Clown? Clueless? Chump? Victorious Steve Bruce rolls with the punches

“Are you a clown, Steve?”

The Newcastle United head coach rolled with the punch.

“In some people’s eyes,” he told The Athletic. “Which is the most disappointing thing, but, look, I don’t think you can manage 400 games in the Premier League and something like 1000 overall, if you’re a clown.”

“Are you clueless?”

There was a small backward step, a little pause. His gaze became a slit.

“Definitely not,” he said.

“Are you a chump?”

“Definitely not.”

“Are you to up to this job?”

“When I first got the call, it was: ‘wow, if there’s any job I want, it’s this one’,” he said. “And I wanted it warts and all. Make no mistake — it’s not easy. When you speak to people, you understand. And when you take it, you understand it more. But I’ve waited all my life to have this badge on my chest.”

Steve Bruce had answered these questions, like he always does, and he had sucked up the insults, but even a wounded bull will charge. In moments like this, there is nothing else the bull can do.

He looked up.

“Maybe it’s all relative… I’d like to think I’ve got a little bit of street cred somewhere. Where this has crept in, that I’m totally clueless, I don’t know. Maybe it’s an age thing. Maybe you get to a certain age and you’re a dinosaur or a has-been, but this idea… this idea that I just send out a team with no thought about what they’re going to do and just say, ‘Right, off you go lads’ is an insult. It’s an insult to me and an insult to my coaches, an’ all.”

The conversation was over. Nearly. He was between media duties at Newcastle’s training ground and as he pushed through a set of doors en route to the next one, there was one more thing.

“That was near the knuckle, that,” he said, turning back. “Am I a clown? Wow.”

Just about everyone in football will tell you what a decent fella Steve Bruce is. He is a big man, too.

In retrospect, that episode on Friday morning may not have been the most edifying of Bruce’s career — three league titles as a player, three FA Cups, two League Cups and a European Cup Winners’ Cup, managing teams for 21 years — but there he was, leaning against a corridor wall being asked if he was hopeless. Perhaps it did not serve much of a purpose, either, except as a reminder that language can bruise.

Clown, chump, clueless; all those words (and plenty of worse ones), have been used about Bruce, 58, on social media or in our own Q&As. “A long career achieving nothing is just an existence,” and “zero pedigree,” said one correspondent. We live in an untethered era, when judges are labelled enemies and MPs branded traitors, and maybe this is just another expression of that. Maybe it is just the emotional extremity which flecks our game, but it has also filtered through into the mainstream.

This is about Bruce, perception, different versions of reality, and Newcastle, a club which wrestles with itself better than any opposition and which, since Rafa Benitez’s departure this summer and yet another takeover disappeared into the ether, has retreated back into discomfort. From the outside, it may appear that Bruce never had a hope at his hometown club but the truth is a little more nuanced; the point, for most supporters, is that hope had already left.

On Sunday afternoon, Bruce presided over his 400th fixture as a Premier League manager, against Manchester United, the club he captained. To call it pivotal would be a slight overstatement, except that Newcastle were 19th in the table and fresh from a 5-0 thrashing at Leicester City, the kind of result which frays bonds. Everybody in this city knows what relegation smells like.

At the final whistle, there was no jubilation. Bruce clasped hands with his staff and with Ole Gunnar Solskjaer; at the 22nd time of asking, he had beaten his former club. The timing was pretty good. Newcastle had won 1-0 but they were organised, drilled, with a solid line of five in midfield. His decision to give Matty Longstaff, brother of Sean, his Premier League debut was a gamble, but it was also not hopeless.

“What we needed was a response after last week and that was there for everyone to see,” Bruce said afterwards. “It just shows you that football management is up and down. You can never write the script. When you lose badly, everyone comes under the pump and when that’s the case, you need your team to rally around. All you can do is answer your critics by getting a result. I hope this is the turning point.”

If the Premier League is the best in the world, then Bruce cannot be a clown. To manage so many games at that level takes talent, expertise, know-how, and a way of communicating ideas to sportsmen. This is something we all forget when our teams are struggling, when existence feels bleak, but the people who represent us, on the field and in the dug-out, do so at a standard way beyond our own. This is the elite.

Elite? What a joke. Birmingham City, Wigan Athletic, Sunderland and Hull City represent a motley form of excellence and this is Bruce’s level, bobbing near the bottom. He is a founder member of the old-boys’, old-school club; Harry Redknapp, David Moyes, Sam Allardyce and Mark Hughes are the names immediately above him on the list of longevity, winners of a single FA Cup between them. What have they done so well, beyond self-preservation?

But what have Newcastle achieved, exactly? Their last domestic trophy came in 1955. Back and forth we go. Look at Bruce’s record; his 112 victories in this division, a win ratio of 28 per cent. Yeah, and over their last 10 seasons in the Premier League, a spell which coincides with the entirety of Mike Ashley’s ownership, Newcastle have played 388 games. They have won 120 of them, a win ratio of 30.9 per cent. This is not a huge disparity.

Take away Benitez, the Champions League winner who saw Newcastle’s potential and then left three years later because it could not be fulfilled, and there is a theme to Ashley’s appointments, a list which includes Steve McClaren, Alan Pardew, John Carver. Bruce is not the exception; Benitez was. And so you can argue, in a manner which will make precisely nobody happy, that Bruce and and Newcastle are the ideal combination.

It does not feel like that, though, and for numerous reasons. As Isaac Hayden told The Athletic the other week, “The reality is that for all the three seasons we’ve been in the Premier League, it’s been relegation battles,” but with Benitez there, with his track record, with the Spaniard relentlessly pushing “to do things right”, fans could feel a connection to ambition. With Bruce in place, it must be a return to doing things wrong.

“For people to say he’s clueless, is just ridiculous,” David Meyler says. “It’s nonsense. He’s not clueless.”

Not too long ago, the midfielder, recently retired, came up to Tyneside to visit his old manager at Sunderland and Hull, to offer his support. “I’d been through so much with him, that a phone call or text message wouldn’t have sufficed, to be honest,” he says. “We chatted for hours.” Meyler was reporting on the Manchester United game for an Irish broadcaster.

In August, Michael Chopra, the former Newcastle forward, said on the radio he had spoken to “senior players” who told him that under Bruce, they “don’t know their jobs — they are not really working on their shape.” His comments came after a dismal 3-1 defeat at Norwich City and they cemented some early concerns. At one point during the team’s opening game of the season, a 1-0 loss to Arsenal, Bruce had turned to his bench and shouted, “What the fuck’s going on?”

A tone had been set and it was hardened when Hayden came over to Bruce during Newcastle’s goalless draw with Brighton and said, “It’s not working.” Then came Leicester City and a day that did not do very much to promote notions of competence, of a plan. Bruce spoke about his team “lacking fight, courage, determination or resilience.” Sean Longstaff described it as “fucking embarrassing.”

“I’d love to know who Michael Chopra meant,” Meyler said. “I speak to Ciaran Clark. People would be well aware of my relationship with him through Ireland. He’s a lad who hasn’t been playing recently (he started against Manchester United), who’s been left out of squads and he only speaks highly about the manager and the work he’s doing. I spoke to quite a few ‘senior players’ when I was up there, and they all seemed to know what was required of them.

“I watched the Leicester game and if we’re going to be completely honest, the lads gave up. I’ve been there. I’ve been in those situations when it’s getting tough and you’re going from game to game thinking: ‘this is the week we turn it around’ and then you concede a bad goal; some lads are cut out for the fight and some aren’t. So the next question is, ‘Can the manager motivate them?’ Yes, he can.”

Meyler has experience of it. Bruce was appointed Hull’s manager in 2012. In his first season, they were promoted; in his second, they finished 16th in the Premier League, the best in their history, and reached the FA Cup final for the first time, qualifying for European football, also a first; in his third, they were relegated; in his fourth, they came back up and then he resigned, tiring of the club’s difficult ownership and transfer frustrations (which should resonate).

“There was no stone left unturned in training,” Meyler said. “That’s why we were successful at Hull. We knew everything about the team we were playing. We were playing with confidence, executing the manager’s game plan. We played three or five at the back, we played four. All different formations. He evolved and we evolved; he’s been managing since he retired as a player but he’s not stuck in some time-warp.”

Steve Harper, Newcastle’s longest-serving player, had two years under Bruce at the KCOM Stadium. “We played 3-5-2 and 4-2-3-1 or 4-4-1-1 during my time there,” the former goalkeeper said. “We changed the system to tactically suit the opposition. In that first season, it worked very well. Getting to Wembley [for the 2014 FA Cup final] and staying in the league fairly comfortably was a big achievement for a club like Hull.

“There was a lot of turmoil going on with regards to the ownership, who were trying to change the club’s name, and it was very much a siege mentality. Steve did a good job shielding us from that. He was fighting a battle with the owners, wanting to improve the club, but what he did get was time. He just gets the best out of players. He’ll invest in finding out what makes you tick, whether it’s an arm around the shoulder or a kick up the backside. He creates an environment.”

He also worked the angles in the transfer market. “Look at Andy Robertson (now at Liverpool), and Harry Maguire (now at Manchester United), as proof,” said Harper. “Look at the players he’s bought and sold on.”

That point is emphasised by Martin Taylor, a centre-half for Bruce at Birmingham City. “Another fantastic attribute is how well he’s done in the transfer market,” he said. “And we’re not talking about a lot of money. When he went to Newcastle and lots of people were asking, ‘Is he the right man?’ … well, if Mike Ashley isn’t going to give him the resources, Brucie is really the type of manager who you’d want in there. It’s cutting your cloth.”

In this regard, Bruce may not have helped himself at Newcastle, coming in late, signing off a handful of new arrivals, including the £40m club-record signing of Joelinton from Hoffenheim, praising a “quite remarkable” transfer window and then promising a new style of front-foot football. Those players were not his decisions and nor were the departures of Ayoze Perez and Salomon Rondon, the team’s main source of goals last season, but they belong to him now.

“As far as I’m concerned, Steve is undoubtedly the most successful manager in the history of Hull City,” Geoff Bielby, the chairman of the club’s supporters trust, said. “Leading a club punching above its weight in the top flight isn’t easy, and maybe not the best way to judge a manager and there were some supporters who disliked his style of play.

“For me, he’ll always be remembered for his achievements and one of those was riding through a tough off-field situation with a disaffected fanbase protesting against the stubbornness of our owners. At least his role at Newcastle will have some familiarities there.”

Having secured promotion at the first time of asking in 2002, Bruce took Birmingham to 13th, 10th and 12th in the Premier League. They were then relegated and came back up. Taylor arrived in 2004. “We yo-yoed a bit but the mood was very buoyant at the club when I got there and finishing in the top-10 was a fantastic achievement for the squad and budget we had. Steve just had that aura of respect which managers need.

“It didn’t matter who you were as a player — world-class, an international, a young lad — everyone had respect for him. His man-management was brilliant. His door was always open and you’d come out of a meeting with him feeling better about yourself. That’s not something that’s always been the case during my career; when you don’t have that, it can cause problems, but he ensured you gave him 100 per cent.

“We always worked harder than other teams. He was tactically flexible, he’d take sessions, but he’s always had a team of excellent coaches around him. He’s not afraid to distribute jobs. That thing about not being tactically aware is not something that should ever be levelled against him because it’s just not true. I’m sure he’s looked at Newcastle’s low possession stats and tried to do something about it but he’ll adapt to what he’s got. He has a lot of tactical nous.”

Bruce’s second spell at Wigan began in 2007, when they were second-bottom of the Premier League and had lost seven games in succession. They stayed up and then finished 11th the following season, after which he joined Sunderland.

Lee Cattermole made the same transition. “Wigan was great but it was a no-brainer to go to Sunderland with Steve,” the midfielder said. “He wanted to build an aggressive, front-foot team, which really suits the club and the city, and I think he really enjoyed it. He looked so comfortable. There was a great set-up there. Niall Quinn was a brilliant figurehead, who had footballing knowledge. Steve had this huge experience and great people around him.

“When you’re at a club, you work at such intensity and you don’t really think about where the club has gone but when I look back now at the set-up Steve had, the players he was bringing in, the recruitment, the standard of everything was proper. It was really good. I loved what he was doing there. You talk about characters and we had a lot of what people would call the wrong types but he had them in line, no problem. He was in charge, the boss. He got the best out of them.”

“If you speak to anyone at Sunderland, they’ll only have good things to say about him,” Meyler said. “He did remarkably well there.” Bruce lasted two full seasons at the Stadium of Light, finishing 13th and 10th, but a fine team fell apart, results drifted, and there were some scattergun signings. His relationship with supporters soured and has not improved in the interim, even without his recent association with Newcastle, the club he followed as a kid.

What frustrates Stephen Goldsmith of the Wise Men Say podcast, is the “revisionist stuff,” the suggestion Bruce was always doomed to fail on Wearside, “because he was a Geordie — in fact, his very final game was the only time that reference came out of the mouths of fans.”

Bruce’s legacy, “is building a good team, underperforming with it, dismantling it and not knowing how to turn the inevitable downturn around,” he said. Tactics? “You never felt he had the nous to change a game or plan for it either,” Goldsmith said. Transfers? “It was like he was playing an early computer game, (new players) don’t come in because they fit a system, they come in because they’re ‘good’ players.”

This is where statistics, memory, context and feeling all collide. Since 1956, Sunderland have only twice ended a season higher than 10th in the top division and they are now in League One, although that does not mean it was blissful at the time. Wigan have spent eight years in the Premier League or its predecessors. For Hull, it is five. To dismiss all that and Bruce’s part of it as meaningless or trivial, as “just an existence,” is to ignore a lot of history and memories.

The problem for Bruce at Newcastle is that “just an existence” is exactly what they have become, that for all their words about winning something or competing, or Joelinton’s arrival, there is never a discernible plan and rarely a sense of straining for better, so the head coach becomes indelibly associated with mediocrity. He is there because Newcastle are settling not striving. He is there precisely because he is not good enough.

He does not see it like that and neither do the people who have played under him. They know how much sweat he expends, how he puts the time and effort in, how he looks at shape and systems and personnel. “And he’s a great bloke as well,” Taylor said. “Everyone will tell you that. It’s a common denominator.” Does that matter? “Yeah, being a good bloke should matter, shouldn’t it? It’s a huge part of being a manager.”

Manchester United altered the narrative. Solskjaer’s team was dreadful and Newcastle still look shy of goals. Nobody thinks this season will be anything other than hard labour because that is their reality and it is how they are run, but victories such as this are rare and Bruce played his part in it. “If people say I’m not good enough, then fine,” he said afterwards. “The tactics stuff is the biggest insult of the lot.”

(Photo: Alex Dodd – CameraSport via Getty Images)