Plenty has changed around St James’ Park since the last time Newcastle United and West Ham United played each other. After scraping survival on the last day of the season, we’ve seen players, coaches and even the manager come and go, with Ashley seemingly making good on his promise to invest in the team and rebuild the squad.

The most notable casualty was John Carver, a man who had tried to write his own fairy tale during a disastrous spell as caretaker manager. In the press he spoke of attacking football, of Sir Bobby and Speedo and of Help From Above, however the reality was almost violently different. Carver picked fights with fans, threw his players under the bus and ranted and raved on the touchlines with impotent fury as we slumped to defeat after defeat, plummeting from 10th place headfirst into a relegation battle; a reptilian lick of his scaly lips following each expletive-laden instruction.

Carver’s final, and least popular, act as manager was to inform Ryan Taylor and Jonas Gutierrez that their contracts were not to be renewed, first telling Taylor, then asking him to pass the phone to Jonas. An undignified end to the careers of two players who had fought their way back into the first team against great adversity. Ironically, this was probably the first successful pass between two Newcastle players that Carver actually coached.

Jonas, in particular, deserved so much more from the club and will probably never get the thanks that he was owed. As a team which has won fuck all for about 50 years, we don’t have many players with glittering, trophy-filled careers; we don’t have Beckhams, or Keanes, or even Gerrards, but as fans, Newcastle United’s supporters will always get behind players who work hard for the team, and no player worked harder than Jonas in his years at the club.

While his countryman, Fabricio Coloccini, struggled to adjust to the physical nature of the Premier League, there were no such worries for Jonas. Stacked six foot tall and with shoulders like an American Footballer, he ran the wing in his first game against Manchester United and was named the most impressive debutant in the Premier League that season by Alan Hansen.

His work rate is indisputable, but there is much more to Jonas than physicality and effort. It’s sometimes forgotten that he was a very skilled footballer and quite how highly rated he was among his fellow pros. Diego Maradona famously said his Argentina squad was “Messi, Mascherano, Jonas and 8 others” while Lionel Messi hailed Jonas as one of the best players in the Premier League.

The real measure of Jonas’ influence is how he eased the pressure on the players around him, allowing them time and space to play their own game and consequently bringing out the best in them. We’ve seen the rapid decline in Jose Enrique’s perceived ability now that he no longer has Jonas protecting him, while many Newcastle fans saw the same with Davide Santon. Watch any compilation of Peter Lovenkrands’ goals in the Championship and see how many of them came from Jonas on the left. When Yohan Cabaye and Hatem Ben Arfa were tearing up the Premier League in 2012, and Papiss Cisse was stealing headlines with goal after goal, Jonas was behind them, playing a holding-midfield-cum-left-wing role which very few players in the world had the stamina to replicate.

When Jonas was diagnosed with testicular cancer, many fans thought we had seen the last of him in a Newcastle shirt. He had already been loaned out to Norwich and his contract was up at the end of the season anyway. That, however, is simply not how Jonas works, and he went on to shrug off chemotherapy as if it were a round of antibiotics and force his way back into first team reckoning. Lots of news outlets were surprised to see a visibly ill Jonas running a marathon for Cancer Research, but Newcastle fans knew that was nothing, after all we’ve seen him run a marathon in support of Paul Dummett at left-back.

Which leads us to the last time Newcastle and West Ham faced off against each other, and what should have been the perfect sending-off for Jonas and his career at Newcastle United.

We were 1–0 up with not long left to go, we needed to win in order to guarantee Premier League survival, Jack Colback had the ball following a Riviere knockdown, and there he is…

Gutierrez, back in the team and in the shape of his life.

Gutierrez, tearing up the wing, despite playing defensive midfield.

Gutierrez, screaming for it, getting it, cutting inside and oh my God...

GUTIERREZ!

His scuffed shot deflected in at the far post, St James’ Park exploded, Jonas legged it towards the fans and cupped his hands to his ears.

I watched the goal in a pub full of Geordie men who haven’t felt an emotion since 2001, former season-ticket holders and fans so out of love with what their club had become that they claimed they didn’t care if they were relegated or not. After that goal, there were real, grown-man, someone’s-dad tears, there were embraces between strangers and then there were those of us who simply didn’t know how to react. I had a 5-minute phone call from my best mate and in total I think we spoke about 8 full words. This was the strangest I’ve ever felt after a goal in my entire life.

You see, on the surface, that goal meant nothing. Moussa Sissoko had already guaranteed survival, and Allardyce’s West Ham had nothing to play for, they never looked like scoring. to Ashley, Charnley and their balance sheets, it made no difference, to Newcastle United Football Club the goal meant nothing.

But what is a club in any case?

Jonas’ goal was just for the fans, just for us, for those of us who had forgotten what it was like to love football and quite how much it could mean to us.

Jonas didn’t need the Spiderman mask to celebrate that goal, he was already the hero.