Slap and fickle Sunday in store for Roeder

Fair enough, Roeder suffered worse than anyone else has ever done with injuries at St James’ Park but even with the players he had available and the games he had to play United should have been at least top eight material.

We kind of got the picture that Glenn had lost the dressing room by some of the heartless performances in the last few weeks.

Not just at Reading but games like Portsmouth, Wigan, Charlton, Man City at home and not least the second part of the AZ Alkmaar farce in the UEFA Cup.

We know football is played on grass and not paper but where were the performances from United’s so called “big guns� when they needed them?

They were all as bad as each other weren't they?

And not many players in the Toon dressing room can look themselves in the mirror and say: “I gave it everything I had in the tank for my manager or the supporters.�

Roeder simply could not beat the performances out of the players in the end and paid the ultimate price for it this week.

Sadly for him, just when he needed Alan Shearer in the dressing room, for the first time in 10 years there wasn’t one there for the black and whites.

Shearer doesn’t suffer fools lightly and would have certainly made a difference in the dressing room from the minute the final whistle went against Liverpool, because that was probably the beginning of the end for Glenn Roeder.

Inept performances used to irritate Shearer like nothing else and if the current side had the same attitude as Big Al, i.e being the first player outside the back four for a corner and suchlike, they would not be going into the final game of the season and going out with a whimper.

Sweating blood for the cause, donning bandages for games when you are playing through injuries and literally crawling off the pitch in your last ever game is also the sort of thing you need to do if you play for the Toon.

Shearer for manager, sadly, seems to be off the menu for now for whatever reason and that's a huge, huge, shame.

And with Big Sam Allardye poised to beat off interest from Gerard Houllier and Sven Goran Eriksson for the hotseat, a whole new and different era seems set to get under way.

The players therefore now know that they are playing for their futures in a different way.

They can’t or shouldn’t be taking it easy at Watford because with a new manager set to come in, none of them are safe.

The new manager will have his own ideas on who he wants and who he doesn’t and that could be good news for some and bad for others.

Who knows, we may yet see Albert Luque come good!

Nigel Pearson goes into a job he had ironically already done once this season after looking after the England Under-21s in the first game at Wembley and follows in the footsteps of John Carver, Tommy Craig and Terry Mac who have all done similar roles when Sir Bobby Robson, Kenny Dalglish and Kevin Keegan also left the club.

Watford were relegated weeks ago and are one of the reasons Newcastle don’t go to Hertfordshire trying to preserve their Premiership status on the final day.

Instead United’s players go there trying to preserve their damaged professional profiles and in a no win situation, because a good win will only show that some of them were short changing the manager who was eventually forced out.

True, Roeder has to take a big portion of the blame too for the performances on the pitch but one of his final acts as manager was to substitute Kieron Dyer and Titus Bramble.

Both of course were roundly booed and it epitomised the contributions of the underperforming stars in recent weeks.

If the problem isn’t lack of effort from certain Toon stars recently, then it must be the inability to know how to or want to express themselves in a black and white and play for the Geordie nation.

Yet even if it comes on Sunday at Watford in the last game, it’ll be around nine months too late as many of the Toon fans who have been there through thick and thin, sadly know only too well.