Perhaps the writing was on the wall the day before the 1999/00 Tyne-Wear derby.
At Newcastle United’s Chester-le-Street training base then manager Ruud Gullit called for an 11v11 match, which customarily featured the XI he intended to pick the following day vs the Reserve team.
Incredibly, both Alan Shearer, ranked at no.4 in FourFourTwo's list of the greatest Premier League players of all time, and Duncan Ferguson were picked for the reserve side, indicating Gullit intended to leave both out of their home game vs arch rivals Sunderland.
The Bomb Squad
“We won 2-0, Alan scored with his left foot, I remember it. I scored a header,” recalls Duncan Ferguson, sitting down for an exclusive one-on-one chat with FourFourTwo to promote his new autobiography.
“Normally, Gullit would change things round if the bomb squad beat the team that was playing against Sunderland, but he never did."
It had been a miserable start to the season for the manager who had joined the club exactly one year previously.
Three defeats to Aston Villa, Tottenham and Southampton, respectively, were followed by a chaotic 3-3 draw with Egil Olsen’s Wimbledon who would eventually be relegated.
A fourth defeat in five games, and to rivals Sunderland, was unthinkable. The context makes Gullit’s decision to leave his captain, and Duncan Ferguson (the most expensive player he would ever sign as a manager) on the bench even more baffling.
“I think he wanted out in the end,” says Ferguson.
“Alan and Gullit were at loggerheads, they were clashing. I felt I got caught in the middle of it with his [Gullit’s] comments after the game.
“I was injured, I wasn’t expected to start the game really. He should’ve started me, he should’ve started Alan, obviously, leaving Alan Shearer out is f**king ridiculous.
“I didn’t like I was getting dragged into an argument either. So I f**king told him.
"I went in early and gave it to him. Him and his assistant were there, he took it to be fair.”
Shearer tells the story that, furious at being left out and losing to Sunderland, he drove to the training ground early to confront Gullit, only to discover Ferguson had beaten him to the manager’s office and removed the door off its hinges.
FourFourTwo asks Ferguson if Shearer’s recollection sounds correct and the fiery Scottish striker admits “it does”.
Ferguson explains: “I was coming storming out, and I remember Alan was coming in, I think he’d been on the school run or something.
“That was ridiculous what he [Gullit] done to him.
“They wanted me to replace Alan at Newcastle. I think that was the strategy, but they maybe thought Alan was on the way out, he was struggling, he wasn’t the same player that he was. But he scored another hundred goals for them! [laughs].
“To be fair, it doesn’t matter how good you are, when people erode away your confidence and are behaving negatively towards you, your form can dip, and I think Alan was struggling at the time.
“He didn’t like Gullit and rightly so because of what happened to him. He was England captain, he was still a class player.”
Gullit handed in his resignation shortly afterwards, while Alan Shearer remained at Newcastle for seven more seasons and went on to score 106 more goals for Newcastle United, breaking records for the most ever scored in the Premier League (260) and the most goals by a Newcastle United player (206).
