Brian Reade Column: Football: Robson right to slag off Loon Army.

Byline: Brian Reade 

I MUST congratulate Bobby Robson (above) for calling the Newcastle fans who dared to criticise his team, "jerks" and "idiots".

How right he is. In fact, Bobby didn't go far enough. He should have said that all the St James' Park regulars are jerks, and referred anyone who disagreed to the hard facts.

Over 50,000 of them turn up at every home game, making Newcastle the second-best supported club in the land, yet for most of the season they have had to endure a diet of dour, directionless mediocrity.

I watched the recent game against Southampton and can honestly say I have never seen a worse Premiership game. It was shocking. The same word I would use to describe how Newcastle fans have been treated in recent years by the men whose hefty wage packets they fill.

Kevin Keegan dangled a glorious, brave new world before their eyes, then walked off in a sulk when the going got tough. Kenny Dalglish promised to take them to the heights he had achieved at Anfield and Ewood Park, but simply stole their flair, dashed their dream and bored them rigid.Ruud Gullit promised them sexy football but seemed more interested in life near the flesh-pots of Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the more passionless foreign mercenaries who joined the ship, the further it sank.

Take Marcelino. Bought from Real Mallorca for pounds 5million in 1999, he has played 15 times in two years, picking up pounds 2million for his non-efforts.

As wastes of space go, this man is in a vacuum of his own. Indeed the only nice thing Geordies will say about him is he's a dead ringer for Viz's Sid The Sexist.

He was out for almost three months with a broken finger, he complained of a groin injury which was literally invisible to the doctors, and last week he told the Spanish press that the treatment he has received on Tyneside has been "humiliating".

Not that Newcastle fans are strangers to betrayal in Spain. Who could forget their chairman and chief executive bragging in a Marbella brothel about how their thick fans fork out pounds 50 for shirts which cost them a fiver? The same chaps who sold their fans seats guaranteed for 10 years, then packed them off to the Gods so they could sell those seats to corporate clients.

So say what you like about Bobby Robson, but age has not withered his faculties. Like the men above him in suits, he knows a shower of jerks when he sees them.

And at least he's had the honesty to go public about it from his office, and not a Spanish whore-house.