Ups and downs. Highs and lows. Joy and despair. Few in football have felt every jolt of the managerial ride quite like Steve Bruce.
Sunday, October 17, 2021 marked a major milestone in his career, as the 61-year-old joined grandees including Sir Alex Ferguson, Arsene Wenger, Sir Bobby Robson, Harry Redknapp and Roy Hodgson in taking charge of 1,000 matches in club football. He marked the achievement in front of a sell-out crowd at St James’ Park too, managing Newcastle United, the team he’d grown up supporting as a kid.
But if ever a day encapsulated the career of Bruce the boss, this was it. Pride, satisfaction and momentary euphoria preceded ultimate heartache, grief and anguish. He’d spent the hours before kick-off going through a flood of congratulatory messages from across the football world, and conducting interviews with television networks from both home and abroad. This game in question was just two minutes old when Bruce was celebrating along with the vast majority of St James’ 52,000-strong crowd, as Callum Wilson fired the Magpies into an early lead against Nuno Espirito Santo’s Tottenham.
However, trouble had long been brewing. The Toon Army may have been in a state of euphoria following the announcement of their Saudi Arabian takeover just a few days earlier, but Bruce was made to feel like a gatecrasher at their party long before the final whistle. While Newcastle’s £300 million financiers were given a rapturous welcome, three Tottenham goals in the space of 28 first-half minutes meant supporters turned on their head coach in a way that the new incumbents could hardly ignore.
And three days later came the inevitable: Bruce’s fate was sealed. It looked like 1,000 and done for a man who’d begun as player-manager for Sheffield United 23 years earlier. But you can’t keep a good man down…
BRUCE (NOT OUT)
Onlookers could have been forgiven for thinking Bruce’s managerial career was finished – after his Magpies exit, even the man himself admitted it was possible. His haunted expression in the dying minutes of that 3-2 Spurs defeat, set to the increasingly common chorus of fury from his own people cascading down from the stands, was
