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Newcastle is a city blessed with special places - a castle, cathedrals, a Town Moor, spectacular bridges, classical streets.

Add to that list St James’ Park.

It is no fringe-of-town Meccano-style new build stadium.

The ground is part of, and overlooks, the city centre. It has been likened to a cathedral on the hill - a telling description given that football is akin to a religion in Newcastle and the North East.

St James’ Park has also occupied the same location for a long, long time.

The history of Newcastle United has been concentrated on this spot since 1892, when Newcastle East End took over the ground of the newly defunct Newcastle West End.

A year later Newcastle joined the Football League and the first home match at SJP ended in a 6-0 win over Arsenal. Those were the days.

But think of all that this ground has seen, felt and heard.

Three league championships between 1904-09, the 68,000 crowd which packed in to see the return of goal-scoring machine Hughie Gallacher, the triple FA Cup winners of the 1950s, the Entertainers of the 1990s and the Champions League victory over Barcelona when the stadium seemed on the verge of levitating, such was the electric atmosphere.

Then there were the great players proud to wear the black and white, from Colin Veitch and Jackie Milburn to Len White, Supermac and Alan Shearer.

It was Sir Bobby Robson who talked about that pulse of excitement when fans first glimpse the pitch and the cavernous bowl of the stadium on match days.

Now, that moment of uplift has gone. Gone, as many supporters will tell you, with the soul of the club.

They question if the Newcastle United of today is the same Newcastle United they have followed for a lifetime.

Instead of being a focus for pride and passion, St James’ Park is now depressing and despairing, a brew of discontent and frustration.

Given the plethora of Sports Direct advertising, it is like sitting inside one of the company’s carrier bags - and where’s the magic in that?

This is not what people go to football matches for.

Every supporter has their culprits for this dire state of affairs.

They point to a deep-rooted rot permeating the club, years of under-investment, an owner who they say runs Newcastle not as a football club to win prizes but as an annexe of, and a platform for, his primary business of Sports Direct.

Staying in the Premier League, by however narrow a squeak, has been enough. There is no vision, no ambition, no purpose, no direction, no hope.

Yet hope is what underpins football. There is always the next match - but in Newcastle’s case the outcome of the next match is too often bleakly predictable.

Has this disinterest, ask the fans, percolated down through the club to the men who really count - the players?

There are other targets. The decisions made by key members of the board which seems a board in name only, the manager/coaches grateful for a job back in the top league and who will always be “happy with the squad”.

Then there is the recruitment policy, focused not on addressing specific positional and tactical requirements but instead on the buying and potential sell-on price - players as commodities,

Ah, the players. They earn more in a week than most fans see in one, two or three years.

Newcastle followers have witnessed their share of limited teams over the years. But the cardinal sin is a lack of effort, application, commitment, bottle and battle.

Pundit Mark Lawrenson, on Sunday’s Match of the Day 2, picked up in this very theme, pinpointing the “fat cat” players at Newcastle who did not seem to be bothered about the prospect of relegation.

“What’s that about?” he asked with genuine bafflement.

Under the present regime, the vital link has been broken between club and a city which has an extraordinarily strong sense of identity and place, which partly comes from the geographical isolation of being bounded by the sea, the river, the Pennines and the moors of Northumberland.

Backed by 2,000 years of history, this has produced a city and wider hinterland with its own dialect, music, literature, humour and even tribal name - the Geordies.

So the club which represents all that is much more than a football team. It is the representative of the city’s pride and character.

But character is the one quality which is in short supply at SJP.

St James’ Park should be the healthy heart of a successful city. These dark days, there is barely a beat.