The Miles Starforth Column
10 Jan 2007
GLENN Roeder and his Newcastle United team thought they'd seen the back of St Andrew's - for a season at least - when they condemned Birmingham City to the Championship late last April.
But - typically - Newcastle were handed an FA Cup third-round tie away to Birmingham this time around. It's never an easy awayday, and Saturday's visit wasn't an afternoon for the faint-hearted.
And the inexperience of David Edgar - the hero at St James's Park just a few days earlier when he drilled in an equaliser against Manchester United - and fellow 19-year-old defender Paul Huntington told on a mud-bath of a pitch at St Andrew's.
Birmingham had, kindly, postponed their re-turfing until after the tie, a decision which backfired when the uneven surface pitch caused an injury to their on-loan striker Nicklas Bendtner.
United, for once, completed 90 minutes without suffering another injury, and the talking point amongst the 4,200 travelling fans after the game was the mistakes at the back which gifted Birmingham their goals.
The home side punished some half-hearted defending to score twice, with DJ Campbell the quickest to react to a first-half corner and Sebastian Larsson netting four minutes from time after a Damien Johnson cross was easily flicked on.
Steven Taylor and Kieron Dyer both found the scoresheet between those two strikes, and their goals should really have sent Newcastle into the fourth round at the first time of asking.
And Roeder knows that unless he can strengthen his defence between now and January 31, then an injury-ravaged United will struggle to fight on one, let alone three, fronts this season. To that end Roeder was on a scouting mission at Anfield on Tuesday night, when Liverpool dumped out of the Carling Cup by Arsenal.
But he's not alone in looking to add to his squad and a number of other managers and scouts were sat alongside him in the directors' box. The question is whose chairman has got the biggest wallet?
It's likely to be a sellers' market this month, and that's not to Newcastle's advantage, despite their reputation as perennial big spenders.
United are still paying for the profligacy of Roeder's predecessors, and the £12m-plus that Graeme Souness splurged on three players two years ago still haunts chairman Freddy Shepherd.
Jean Alain Boumsong, Amady Faye and Celestine Babayaro all arrived on Tyneside amid a fanfare in January 2005. But Boumsong and Faye have already left the club after a disastrous time at St James' Park, and it's telling that signing a left-back is Roeder's biggest priority this month.
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