Tyneside reserves judgment

If the phrase "in a sense" did not flood the conversation of Sir John Hall like black-and-white replica shirts at St James' Park on a Saturday afternoon, then Kenny Dalglish might have had cause to raise his sandy eyebrows earlier this week had he heard Sir John say: "Kenny, in a sense, will get it right."

What Hall meant, and presumably what he meant to say, was: "Kenny will get it right." It is just that when Hall becomes excited the words and ideas tumble from his mouth like alphabet spaghetti from a can. You can ask Hall five questions and find yourself wading through pasta shapes; you can ask Dalglish the same and not be sure of five baked beans.

So it was on Tuesday afternoon, high in a room at St James' Park - turn right at the trophy cabinet, the one without a significant piece of new silverware since 1969 - that while Hall was in full-on rant mode, simultaneously lambasting the journalists in front of him for the pain they had caused his family while defending the freedom of the press, Dalglish had his defences on all systems go.

"The key area is that green rectangle with the white lines around it," is his favourite answer to questions about "key areas" in big games. It is not an unfunny response, but others, directed at reporters - such as "People have dismissed the successes, people with selective memories" - ignore widely held concerns about Dalglish's style of management as much as his results.

These are not confined to journalists; they feature in every letters page of Newcastle's papers, and they centre on the key area of whether Dalglish will get it right, and in what sense.

Victory today, for example, would mean that Dalglish could resign at five o'clock and be able to say that in 1 1/2 seasons at St James' Park he had taken a team Kevin Keegan felt he could no longer inspire and given it the will to claw itself into the Champions League and win the FA Cup. In headline terms alone, he would have justified his position.

Failure at Wembley, however - in particular, failure without glory - and Tyneside's opinion of Dalglish could alter considerably. After all, it might be said the only reason Newcastle were not in the Champions League the previous season was because it was then open only to champions - they finished second under Keegan, too.

Getting to Wembley involved beating Everton, Stevenage Borough, Tranmere Rovers, Barnsley and Sheffield United - hardly trial after trial - and along the way Newcastle lost the country in the battle known as Stevenage's Temporary Stand.

To those for whom the memory of Dalglish's rosy cheeks and winning smile easily compensated for his deliberate caution when confronted by a camera, this felt like a turning point. For the first time in public Dalglish had come across as a man who lacked magnanimity and it was a shock.

What comes across, though, is often not the full story, and a couple of weeks ago, in the back room of a Durham restaurant, Dalglish gave another version of the events of early January. "The draw was made on the Sunday after the Everton game. We had a press conference on the Monday and all I said was we didn't have any problem as long as the safety criteria were met.

"We didn't have a problem, and I rang Paul Fairclough (Stevenage's manager) and told him that. There is no way anybody was trying to be disrespectful. What would have happened if we had gone there and something unforeseen had happened? Where do Stevenage go then? Where do we go? We never said we would not go and play there. That was never said."

That day Dalglish was speaking with a passion and reason rarely seen on screen, but Newcastle's problem in January was that Victor Green, the Stevenage chairman, was playing a blinder with the media, and Dalglish knew it. "They had someone who was able to manipulate the press and who coerced the press to get his point over. There were hundreds of things in our favour that never hit the press because it would not have been suitable and because Green outmanoeuvred us. So we were outmanoeuvred, but we were not wrong."

Asked what Fairclough had said when Dalglish telephoned, Dalglish replied: "I could not work out what he meant because he is one of those lateral thinkers - is that what they call it?"

Dalglish was also upset that a Hillsbrough connection was being made - "they tried to use that as fodder as well" - though Newcastle's first away fixture after Stevenage was at Sheffield Wednesday. He also pointed out the lack of coverage of gestures such as Newcastle opening St James' Park for Stevenage the week before the replay.

Dalglish, though, has himself to blame at times for the coverage he receives. Perhaps the greatest hindrance he encountered, and the one he rectified first, was Keegan's axing of Newcastle's reserve team. This brought about the situation in Champions League games where Newcastle simply did not have enough bodies to fill the bench. This partly explains some of Newcastle's difficulties, but will Dalglish say so, even obliquely? No.

Ask him about the way he has developed youth teams, strengthening the club from the bottom up, and even minor personal details such as buying a house in the area and putting his children in school within a week of his arrival - details that suggest his commitment to Newcastle extends beyond his contract - and any further information has to be winkled out.

He was slightly more forthcoming on departed players such as Lee Clark, Robbie Elliott and Faustino Asprilla. The first two would have been ideal squad members, but, as Dalglish said: "They don't want to be squad players, they want to be first-team players like anyone else."

On Asprilla, he said simply: "If someone doesn't want to go, they stay. If I had been given a choice, I would not have sold anybody, including (Les) Ferdinand and (David) Ginola. But before I came Ginola was talking to Barcelona. When I came here he asked for a transfer and never turned up for pre-season.