BY THE time you read this Alan Shearer may be full-time manager of Newcastle United – heaven help him!

He’s already asking for £20 million to spend if the fallen giants are to stand a prayer of getting back up out of the Championship at the first attempt.

This to a man who has just lost £100 million with little sign of getting his money back. Football truly is a funny farm.

Mike Ashley allowed Sam Allardyce and Kevin Keegan the freedom of his cheque book to acquire giants of the game like Joey Barton, Fabricio Collocini, Jonas Gutierrez, Xisco, and the crock that is Michael Owen.

It would be enough to put him off trusting any manager’s knowledge of footballers ever again.

Shearer may be his best option, even though his managerial experience stretches to just eight games including one win, but I for one wouldn’t back Newcastle winning at Scunthorpe or Peterborough next season.

Everybody will be hell bent on beating them and it’s going to need a massivetransformation in playing personnel and dressing room spirit to turn this particular ship around.

DON’T YOU think it’s weird how we can all remember who opened the batting for Meltham when we were five years old, or who had a runny nose in junior school, and yet we haven’t a clue where we went last week ?

There is a name for it – but I’ve forgotten it already!

I suppose we were so impressionable in our formative years and things meant so much that images became indelible in the mind.

All sorts of memories came flooding back for me this week with the arrival of the Australian cricket team on these shores.

Forget about Twenty20 they are here to win the Ashes and that’s all that matters.

Perhaps the most seminal day of my life came in 1953 when as an 11 year-old I was taken by my schoolmaster Mr Jonathan to watch Yorkshire play the Australian touring team at Bradford Park Avenue.

It was my first big sporting occasion, the first time I’d seen the baggy green caps, the first time I’d tasted true sporting theatre.

I don’t need to look up the record books. Australia scored 453-6 with Keith Miller mixing belligerent and effortless strokes making 159 not out, Richie Benaud 97, and then our hero Len Hutton being bowled by Ray Lindwall for a duck.

Three great names there and while Neil Harvey and Arthur Morris also played, the player who sticks in my mind most of all was the youngest member of the touring party Ian Craig, probably because he was the nearest fielder to me most of the day as I crouched with my pack of sandwiches and bottle of pop on the boundary ropes.

Yorkshire were thrashed by an innings but that didn’t matter to me. A love of sport was born that very day and has never subsided.

I truly hope that there is a generation of 10 and 11-year-olds out there now who will be caught by the same bug this summer.

It doesn’t matter if it’s not cricket. It could be tennis, polo, canoeing or croquet for that matter but I do think it’s good to have a sporting passion – an outdoors pursuit preferably – because people who don’t enjoy sport don’t know what they’re missing.

To play a team game is truly special and character building.

Individual sports like golf and tennis breed different animals and can be tremendously satisfying and financially rewarding too, of course, but to be part of a team is a unique experience.

I can only imagine what it must be like to be part of a side that wins a World Cup, a European Cup, a Test match or a Ryder Cup.

Amazing I suspect and I’m envious of all those who achieve the honour.

WHAT I love most about golf is that there’s a different winner virtually every week.

Okay, if Tiger plays he wins more than most, but even he is not invincible and he usually gets pushed all the way to the very last putt.

Sometimes there is a first time winner like the Irish prodigy Rory McIlroy when he scored his maiden triumph to leap into the world’s top 50, sometimes it’s even an amateur as happened in Ireland a couple of weeks ago, and on Sunday it was a Frenchman taking a title for the first time in five years.

Christian Cevaer had virtually disappeared off the radar before the won the European Open at the London Club, and perhaps significantly the duo who pushed him closest Steve Webster and Gary Orr have also been conspicuous by their absence for the bulk of this millennium.

Golf is that sort of game. One week a champ the next a chump, or vice versa in Cevaer’s case.

If only football were like that again – and the same four clubs (you know who I mean) didn’t win every week.

At least Burnley are back in our Premier League. It only needs Preston to go up next season and the table will start to resemble that in the fifties and sixties.