Cisse key to Newcastle

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Papiss Cisse

For a passive football fan, Newcastle United may not be a ‘big club’. In an era when Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s Manchester City, Roman Abramovich’s Chelsea and the colossus named Manchester United hold sway, one perhaps cannot blame them for overlooking the northernmost Premier League club in England.

For the glory days when Magpies won four First Division (later rechristened as the English Premier League in 1992) titles and three FA Cups are now just numbers in record-keeping books. Even the exploits of the great Alan Shearer, after his record transfer to the club in 1996, are remembered only in terrace-chants tribute videos.
However, the 2011-12 season came as a turnaround for the St James’ Park-based club. Thanks to the ‘French revolution’ — manager Alan Pardew cherry-picked French speaking players from Bundesliga and Ligue 1 — the team finished fifth in the table, with a promise of much more in the offing.
But almost half-way down the 2012-13 season, the revolution seemed to have lost its steam. Despite retaining almost all their key players in the summer transfer window, Newcastle find themselves a lowly 15th in the table. A return of 20 points from 21 games does no justice to the talent at hand for Pardew. Only a year ago, Newcastle — along with Swansea City — were called the ‘most attractive’ in the league. For Pardew, the sale of Demba Ba — their top-scorer this season with 13 goals — to Chelsea, couldn’t have come at a worse time.
But have the Magpies really sunk so deep in the quagmire to abandon all hope? Not if a man in the No. 9 jersey — no, we are not talking about Shearer — replicates the form he showed post-New Year last season.
No one who watched the 2011-12 season would have forgotten Papiss Cisse’s array of wonder goals. It seemed the French-speaking Senegalese international then bought for just £9m, had decided to clean sweep the Top 10 goals list.
Even if, akin The Forgotten, some supernatural force carries out a pan-civilisation memory wipe-out, Chelsea fans would still recollect Cisse’s Goal Of the Season-winning strike against the Blues on May 2, 2012.
From outside the 18-yard box, on the left-hand side of the field, Cisse swung at the ball off the bounce, with outside of his boot. What transpired was pure magic. The ball swirled over the box into the top-right corner of the post, leaving the veteran Petr Cech bamboozled, like a five-year old who lost out in a game of beach-frisbee.
As the highly-talented Magpies get set for another post-New Year grind in the league, they would hope their frontman rekindles the magic all over again, even more frequently.