If Kinnear is having a final say on transfers and is the public face of Newcastle, there needs to be more to him than meets the eye. And it can’t be fiction.

A very nice man, Bobby Gould. He sat in the studio at talkSPORT listening to Joe Kinnear take credit for some of the most value-for-money, insightful transfers in the history of the Premier League, and never said so much as excuse me, sunshine.

‘They say I haven’t had any experience in buying and selling players,’ jabbered Kinnear. ‘Sure I have — I bought Dean Holdsworth for 50 grand, sold him for £3million. I sold John Scales for £3m — he was a free transfer. I sold Robbie Earle for XYZ. I sold Marcus Gayle, Leonhardsen, Keith Curle, Micky Harford, John Hartson, Hans Segers. Most of them were free transfers.’

Do you know how many free transfers were actually in that list? None. Do you know who bought three of them? Bobby Gould. Among the best ones, too. John Scales for £70,000, plus Keith Curle and Hans Segers.



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Notorious: Joe Kinnear is renowned for his expletive-laden rants at officials and journalists in the past

Kinnear wasn’t even at Wimbledon then. He was reserve manager when Ray Harford paid Port Vale £750,000 for Robbie Earle. And Earle wasn’t sold for X, Y or even Z, as Kinnear speculates. He wasn’t sold at all, in fact. Earle suffered a ruptured pancreas playing for Wimbledon reserves in 2000 and, later that year, retired.

The strange thing is that Kinnear does not need to aggrandise his achievements at Wimbledon.

Even without taking credit for Gould’s transfer acumen his time in south London remains the highlight on his c.v.

Kinnear was reserve-team manager from 1989 and took over the first team in January 1992. Under his stewardship, Wimbledon finished sixth in 1993-94 and achieved significant top-10 finishes in other seasons despite playing their home matches at Crystal Palace. He stood down for health reasons in June 1999 and the next season Wimbledon were relegated from the Premier League, never to return.

That club, in its previous format, does not even exist any more. So Kinnear has plenty to shout about without, basically, making stuff up.

Holdsworth cost £650,000, not £50,000, from Brentford and far from most of Kinnear’s list of signings being free transfers, all cost money. Kinnear signed John Hartson for £7.5m, a club record, from West Ham United and when he left following relegation it was to join Coventry City on a pay-as-you-play deal. Terry Burton was Wimbledon manager by then.

Kinnear made a decent return, £2.85m, on Holdsworth and Oyvind Leonhardsen, but both players cost £650,000. They were not plucked from obscurity. A lot of managers add a little gravy to their achievements, but not like this. Kinnear turns three Manager of the Month awards into the same number of Manager of the Year prizes (for the record he was Manager of the Year once) and heaven knows how he adds up his total appearances for Tottenham Hotspur.



Really, Joe? Kinnear claimed to have signed both John Scales (left) and Hans Segers (right) while at Wimbledon



Inflated: Kinnear claimed to have signed a number of Wimbledon players that were brought in by Bobby Gould

Leading man: Kinnear claimed to have picked Dean Holdsworth from obscurity

He said he played over 400 games for the club, but records show 196 league appearances over 10 seasons, meaning he would have had to play more than 20 cup games each year to pass the 400 mark. That’s a lot of replays. The real total is 258. That’s not to be sniffed at, either. So why exaggerate?

‘I have been to various countries watching games,’ Owen Coyle, the new Wigan Athletic manager, soothed this week. Has he?



Fiction: Robbie Earle retired while at Wimbledon and was never sold by Kinnear, as he claimed

We take his word for it. The same generosity wouldn’t be extended to Kinnear now.

Coyle could be an aficionado of the European game immersed in the principles of the La Masia academy, or he may have stuck his head around the door once at Tenerife during a winter holiday. It is a matter of trust.

Every utterance from Kinnear as director of football at Newcastle United, though, will be met with scepticism. Kinnear has been the victim of appalling snobbery for dropping a few aitches and a few F-bombs in the past, but this runs deeper.

Favourite: Mike Ashley and Kinnear are good friends

Kinnear: Which one is Simon Bird (North East based football writer for the Daily Mirror)?

Bird: Me.

Kinnear: You’re a c***.

Bird: Thank you.

Now we’ve all had that from Joe on occasions. During his time at Wimbledon we had a row that began in the car park at Selhurst Park, continued up several flights of stairs and ended with us bursting into the press room shouting at the top of our voices.

His last expletive-strewn utterance was that he effing wouldn’t be effing answering any of my effing questions. I let a couple go and asked the third. He replied as if nothing had happened. He has never mentioned it since.

That’s Joe. What it isn’t, however, is the model of a very modern director of football. It is hard to imagine the new raft of executives at Manchester City, for instance, opening a public discussion by calling a member of the press a c***, or being caught out over the pronunciation of names or matters of public record such as transfer fees and dates of arrival.

Kinnear was a fine player. He served 10 years at Tottenham, won four cups — not five as he stated — and made 26 appearances for the Republic of Ireland. There is no reason he would not know a player. Indeed, Kinnear might be as well in with the greats of the game as he suggests.

The point is, with his coarse outbursts and insulting struggles with foreign names, he does not fit the profile of the continental sophisticate naturally palling around with Arsene Wenger.

The Premier League is a global competition. There is a difference between losing a sense of national identity with an influx of foreign staff, and employing a senior executive who risks diplomatic incident by calling players Kebab and Insomnia because he can’t be bothered to recall and pronounce Cabaye and N’Zogbia.

Really? Kinnear mispronounced star man Yohan Cabaye's (right) name in a radio interview

Insomnia: Kinnear riled former Newcastle winger Charles N'Zogbia with a slip of his tongue

Mike Ashley, the Newcastle owner, is believed to like Kinnear best of all his managers, but that is not enough.

No doubt he enjoys the fact that he calls a spade a f****** shovel and journalists a bunch of, well, you know.

Yet football is more complex now. The old-school ally can be your valued friend in the boardroom telling it like it is — Bobby Campbell is close to Roman Abramovich, for instance — but if Kinnear is having a final say on transfers and is the public face of Newcastle, there needs to be more to him than meets the eye. Much more. And it can’t be fiction.

Glenn Hoddle’s candidacy for the now vacant role of England Under 21 manager would appear to be a non-starter.



‘It wouldn’t interest me unless they changed the rules,’ he said. ‘Why would anybody be interested when your better players are not going to be there with you? If the Under 21 coach gets the best and strongest team we can go on to win things.’



Non-starter: Glenn Hoddle is unlikely to land the Under 21 role after Stuart Pearce leaves

An England Under 21 coach on collision course with the senior manager over the availability of players?



The Football Association would not like that. David Bernstein, the FA chairman, made it very clear last week — the Under 21 coach is a second-class citizen, gets what he is given and learns to like it. Poor old Gareth Southgate it is, then.

The best man won. That is all anyone needs to know about the 2013 US Open. That is the vindication for the USGA, and the perfect rebuttal for all the moaners. Justin Rose played the finest and most consistent golf over four days and went home with the trophy.

On the final Sunday, when it mattered most, he was quite exceptional. QED.

Rory McIlroy was bent out of shape, as was one of his clubs, after he drove into water and then a small creek on the 11th, and Martin Laird offered a cuss to the organisers. ‘From 14 to 18 is the hardest finish in golf,’ he said. ‘It really is brutal. I like hard set-ups, but a few of the positions were ridiculous.

Best in show: Justin Rose was the deserved winner of the US Open after some brilliant golf at Merion

‘The US Open beats you up from first tee to last. It can make you look like an idiot — and that’s hard to handle.’

Tough. The US Open, like all of golf’s majors, has a character of its own.

It’s the nasty one, the spiteful one, the major that doesn’t care if you like it or not. And Merion is its spiritual home.

There have been five US Open winners there, and not one of them has led at the end of any round, bar the last.

Laird was most recently victorious at the 2013 Valero Texas Open on the TPC San Antonio Oaks course that is all of three years old. He shot 63 on the final day to beat McIlroy. His first Tour victory, the Justin Timberlake for Shriners Hospitals for Children Open, came after scores of 63, 67, 67 and 68.

Clearly, Laird might not be as keen on difficult set-ups as he makes out.

He shot 68 on the last day at Merion, too, and finished tied 21st on 11 over par. So the course wasn’t impossible. Laird, a naturally big hitter, just didn’t handle it as well as the leading pack. That was Rose’s triumph. He understood what made Merion special and he embraced the philosophy of the US Open. He left with more than just a trophy. He got one of the red wicker baskets that perch atop the pins on the East Course. Rose is not just a US Open champion. He is a Merion US Open champion.

On the ball: Rose played the most consistent golf and took home his first major trophy

On the ball: Rose played the most consistent golf and took home his first major trophy

The debate about difficulty was up and running before the caravans had departed. ‘Was Merion too tough?’ Philadelphia’s morning shows were asking. Don’t be soft. Merion was what it was: a fantastic, intellectual test of precision golf and course management, with a yardage made for a different time. So the USGA, anxious that a historic venue was not left vulnerable, gave it help with devilish pin placements and punitive rough. Some guys handled it; others were too naïve or arrogant.

Phil Mickelson did not put a driver in his bag, but carried five different wedges. He led for three days. The champion, meanwhile, in a classy and dignified post-mortem, demonstrated why he was a worthy Merion winner. He understood, from day one.

‘On Saturday, after finishing bogey, bogey, I felt pretty despondent until I realised the whole field had had trouble on those two holes,’ Rose explained. ‘So I shook that off really quickly and figured the last five holes you have to treat differently. You take par off your scorecard because maybe two over is the real par.

‘If you got out of position off the tee, it didn’t pay to get greedy. If the course offered me bogey, I took bogey. I don’t think I made a double all week. And that’s why I was able to shoot 281.’ It was all there, in that short address. All the wisdom of a champion. ‘The courses in the north-east are the classics,’ said Douglas Smith, a respected course architect.

Not again: Phil Mickelson finished joint runner-up after fluffing his lines in the final round at the tricky course

‘You need 72 holes of strategy from the tee box out. A lot of these guys are “bombs away” without much thought. That doesn’t work here.’

So, is it right to make the greatest golfers in the world struggle, and deny the gallery the spectacle of the standard birdie barrage? Of course, it is. The US Open is unique in the challenge it presents — like Augusta National, like the barren links courses of the Open Championship.

The last nine tournaments have produced six winners of even or over par. Rory McIlroy’s 16 under to triumph at Congressional Country Club in Maryland — by four shots, the biggest win in US Open history — will not be repeated anytime soon.

The 2014 edition will be played on the sandhills of Pinehurst course No 2 in North Carolina, designed by a Scotsman, Donald Ross. It will be harsh, again. Payne Stewart shot one under par to win there in 1999, and Michael Campbell recorded level par for victory six years later. In 2010, Ben Crenshaw and Bill Coore were recruited to restore Pinehurst No 2 to Ross’s original, wild glory, a time when three-times major winner Tommy Armour described it as ‘the kind of course that gets into the blood of an old trouper.’



Thinking man's game: Rose's performance at Merion was nothing short of magnificent

There is no rough, but the domed greens are legendary, built in the image of Royal Dornoch in Sutherland, and much smaller than they look, due to the dramatic fall-off. Greens cover 5,500 square feet at Pinehurst, but 3,000 of that is diverting slope. A wayward shot from the tee comes to rest in one of the bunkers or on the natural sandy carpet of beach grasses, pine straw and wire grass with a lottery lie.