Peter Beardsley’s conduct at Newcastle United’s training ground has caused divisions and raised eyebrows for years, according to George Caulkin.
In a column for the Times, the north-east correspondent cites an academy colleague of Beardley’s during his time at the club that formally ended on Wednesday as saying the former England striker was out of sync with modern football.
“Thirty years out of date,” he said of Beardsley. “Everything is negative, negative, negative. Young players now — the world now — are much more sensitive, but he constantly puts them down. Not many first-teamers can take that now, let alone kids.”
Caulkins reports “that aura of negativity has been the talk of the training ground…for years” and the behaviour of Beardsley did not change even though he and former academy director Kenny Wharton were cleared of accusations of bullying by a Premier League inquiry in 2004.
OPINION
This is brilliant insight into Beardsley, what shaped his own career and the coaching style that came to be seen as totally out of step in an era when players have to be treated with kid gloves. The black-and-white bleeding Geordie was a man of time, who learned his trade against roughhouse defenders in late 1970s and early 1980s, when you would virtually need to maim someone to get a yellow card. That toughened Beardsley up and enabled him to thrive at the elite level, but attempts to replicate that in his own coaching ended in discord as Newcastle’s under-23 coach since 2009 finally severed his ties with the club after he had been on gardening leave for more than a year while allegations, which he denies, of racism and bullying were investigated. Beardsley’s failing, as Caulkin’s excellent analysis demonstrates, was his failure to adapt his man-management methods, which is the ultimate skill of all the great coaches and methods.