Imagine waiting for your loved one for more than two decades. Anticipating, rushing, going back and forth. Losing her to some anonymous, then seeing your life slowly descending into chaos… and day by day, she seems so distant, like you’ll never see her again. But then, tables turn, and you start a subtle recovery thanks to a friend who knows you like the palm of his hand and makes sure you bounce back marvellously.And, all of a sudden, there she is. Hand in hand, 21 years later. The dream comes true.Suppose you’re familiar with such a life story. In that case, it’s a fair chance you’ll understand Alan Shearer’s thrill and jubilation following last night’s Newcastle goalless draw against Leicester, which secured the Magpies’ place in the Champions League next season. After 21-year-long hiatus.The Saudis are in Europe – Newcastle qualifies for the Champions League!Therefore, the legendary striker under whose guidance the Geordies played in the UCL back in 2002 wrote an emotional letter to current Newcastle coach Eddie Howe.It’s a long, long one, overwhelming, and sincere…##EDITORS_CHOICE##”Dear Eddie,Thank you.Thank you for the top four, for the Champions League, for this season of discovery and self-discovery, for the wonder of winning and its piercing noise. Thank you for the primal rage of St James’ Park.Thank you for giving us the month of May and a flutter of tension, a feeling which is familiar and a reason that is not, to be the hunters, not the hunted.Thank you for this heartbeat.Thank you for this version of Newcastle United, one which plays angry and plays loud, which runs and keeps running until lungs explode and legs collapse and then runs on empty until there is nowhere left to run. Thank you for this regal fury.WE ARE NEWCASTLE UNITED.WE ARE CHAMPIONS LEAGUE! 🙌🙌 pic.twitter.com/NaMKa6CJGJ— Newcastle United FC (@NUFC) May 22, 2023 Thank you for allowing us to reclaim our streets; people smiling, restaurants buzzing, bars buzzing, an entire city a beehive of buzzing, connected to the club again, one and indivisible, alive and awash with happiness.After all those sour years of being patronised or ignored, of people failing to appreciate why things were so shit, of being told we expected too much or demanded too much or felt too much, thank you for reminding us not to give a fuck.##NAJAVA_MECA_7277772##Thank you for tapping into a part of our personality, as a club and a place, we had half-forgotten. You are not Kevin Keegan or Sir Bobby Robson, you are solid and less flamboyant, but when I interviewed you in September and you said, “I’m not here to just exist”, it struck me like a fist. So much of our identity as a region is about isolation, being cast aside or left to rot and we either accept it or we fight. Thank you for the fight.Newcastle will play Champions League football next season for the first time since 2003 🌟 pic.twitter.com/wQwjOaYxCr— B/R Football (@brfootball) May 22, 2023 Thank you for coming here and getting us. Thank you for bothering. In spite of some witless commentary over the decades, Newcastle has never been wedded to kamikaze football or Hollywood signings or distrustful of outsiders. The most fundamental aspects of Newcastle have always been our openness, our industry. Embrace us like we embrace life, like we embrace you, and we never let go.You are a man of Bournemouth. You are a man of Newcastle. Thank you, for being one of us.Newcastle are back in The Champions League for the first time since 02/03 pic.twitter.com/C3D6ar133t— My Greatest 11 (@MyGreatest11) May 22, 2023 Thank you for letting me walk into work with a swagger, free of dread. Thank you for letting me take the piss rather than having the piss ripped from me. Thank you for making the professional part of my life a pleasure, knowing I’ll have goals to drool over, blocks to boast about, pressing to admire.Thank you for letting us release our anxiety, for making other teams shrivel from us. Thank you for letting us travel the country, not with hope but with belief, the certain knowledge that our players will give everything, chase everything, scrap for everything.Thank you for making us clever as well as good, street-smart warriors who can manage a game and see it out. Sam Allardyce was spot on when he called out all that bullshit and said everybody does it, all the big teams, as if Pep Guardiola’s magnificent Manchester City don’t know how to clip an opponent’s heels when it suits them.City players celebrate title after Arsenal’s lossHaving said that, thank you for the shithousing because it’s fucking brilliant and it’s fucking hilarious.Thank you for forging this fine team. As I write to you, I can picture the response from elsewhere – “calm down, you’ve not won anything” – but those people don’t appreciate how little we’ve had to cheer and how novel it feels to see your lads put a shift in, enhancing each other. They are a team in the purest sense, greater than the sum of their parts, all in it together.Some will go, others will replace them, but thank you for building the class of 2022-23 and the memories they will leave, a special, grounded group who, for one more match, are bonded together, welded together, who have lifted Newcastle towards the elite.The easy thing, the lazy thing, is to say you’ve splurged a fortune, but not compared to plenty of others and what you’ve actually done is take a club at its lowest ebb, bottom of the Premier League, and offered balance to years of under-spending or misspending. Thank you for buying well and sensibly, for making your foundation a core of character.Late Magpies’ blitzkrieg decides the battle of the season’s pleasant surprisesThank you for not going down that well-trodden route of instant gratification. Thank you for giving us Bruno Guimaraes, Sven Botman and Alexander Isak, quality players we were intrigued by but who were hardly household names. Thank you for those gorgeous shimmies and soft, weighted touches and a promise of the Newcastle to come…Thank you for bringing Dan Burn home to us, for letting him be us and represent us, game in, week out, for the drive and delight of realising his boyhood dream, from watching the Champions League as a kid to taking us there.Thank you for your skill at resurrection, for yanking back players we had half-pushed out the door. Thank you for Joelinton, a joke centre-forward but the most serious, substantive midfielder you could imagine, a beast, a presence, as hard as they come, launching into everything.##NAJAVA_MECA_7277788##Thank you for the conversation I had the other day when I turned to a mate and said: “You know, we’re just not the same team without Sean Longstaff,” and then catching myself as I said it, an unimaginable sentence a couple of years ago and a forgotten footballer, now integral to everything good about Newcastle. Thank you for Fabian Schar, for Jacob Murphy, for Miguel Almiron and colossal improvement.Thank you for Kieran Trippier, the first piece of your jigsaw and still the most vital, for his brilliant delivery and his brilliant leadership. He was the big one, an England international, a winner of La Liga, who saw what might lie beyond the muddy wasteland of a relegation battle. He was the message, the signature signing, the statement and he has been a proper, proper, fucking captain all season.Eddie Howe only joined Newcastle 18 months ago…They’ve gone from fighting relegation to qualifying for the Champions League in that time!What a job he’s done 👏 pic.twitter.com/ZqqiapQL8D— ESPN UK (@ESPNUK) May 22, 2023 Thank you for this miserly defence and this expansive forward line, for Nick Pope’s saves and Callum Wilson’s goals. Thank you for – and to – all of them.Thank you for our lost weekend in London, for that drunken karaoke in Trafalgar Square. If the Carabao Cup final didn’t go the way we wanted, the way we planned – catching us just as we dipped – then thank you for encouraging us to dream again, to yearn again, to have that bittersweet pain of a near miss.Thank you for letting us have our history. Thank you for inviting me to the training ground in the days before Wembley, when I spoke to your squad and told them they’d already made us proud. Thank you for doing the same with other old players, for making us feel part of one unbroken chain – a chain that had snapped under the previous ownership – the same stretch of grass, the same stadium, the same club, the same urge to be there and share in it.All of us, United.Newcastle in the Champions League in 1997. #NUFC #NewcastleUnited #ToonArmy #Newcastle pic.twitter.com/Xpxp5dEDwh— 90’s Football Memories (@90sFootballUK1) May 22, 2023 Thank you for this beginning.”(I’ve) got that fear of tomorrow,” you said in our interview, but If I can ask one thing of you, Eddie, just one more thing, it’s this: let tomorrow go to hell, just this once. Look up and look around, see what you’ve unleashed and drink it in.Thank you for making a home feel like home again.Best wishes,Alan.”
