Why Cole fires painful memories of Entertainers

Few things bring home the problems of the present better than a glorious past.

Can it really be 15 years since a Cole-fired Geordie juggernaut hit the top flight head on, crushing reputations as it went?

Is it really a decade and a half since a Premier League pecking order now set in stone was shattered by Kevin Keegan's Entertainers?

In my mind, those days seem so close. Yet in the grim reality of Newcastle United today, they are so very far away.

As the Magpies, armed with the feints and footwork of Peter Beardsley and Cole's rapier thrust, swept almost all before them in their maiden season after promotion, pretty much anything appeared possible.

Not least the now impossible: becoming every non-North East fan's second favourite team.

Nothing measures United's decline like the club's fall from grace to disgrace.

In 1993/94, every Newcastle game became an event. A national event, that is, as an appreciative Sky Sports went with the flow, and Richard Keys' salmon-coloured blazers became a near-permanent fixture at St James's Park.

Keegan's men scored 82 league goals -- a figure only ever bettered in the intervening 14 years by Arsenal and Manchester United.

To put that total into a more parochial context, it is only one less than Newcastle have managed in the last two seasons combined.

They managed 12 more goals in the League Cup alone. In three games.

Indeed, of all my recollections of Cole and the club in their pomp, his hat-trick in a 7-1 second-round win at Notts County springs as readily to mind as any.

These days, Newcastle would regard that same cup tie as a banana skin. Back then, it merely offered a platform for their stellar talents.

Cole struck 41 times in all that year, and a still joint-record 34 times in the league. With Beardsley bagging 24 goals in total, theirs remains the most prolific one-season partnership in Premier League history.

The Magpies may only have finished third and qualified for the UEFA Cup, but they won a place in multi-millions of hearts.

What odds would you have got then on United still being without a trophy -- without a hope of one -- today?

Yes, hope. The currency of Tyneside since time immemorial, but its value now fallen further south than the pound, and still sliding.

Sadly, the last knockings of his career saw Cole once again become a symbol for Newcastle . . . a spent force trying to trade on long-gone glories.

Such glories, in the case of Newcastle, that they genuinely felt they could do without Cole at a time when, at 23, he seemed yet to even reach his peak.

Now, as their rudderless ship lists ever further, they are in no position even to decide whether to sell their best player.

Ah, the way Newcastle were. Can it be that it was all so simple then? Sadly, yes.

And what's too painful to remember, Tyneside cannot simply choose to forget.