Source: Telegraph
Sir Bobby Robson: Fans flock to St James' Park to mourn passing of a legend
They were attempts by those grateful for all he did for Newcastle, for England, to show their appreciation for the dulcet, decorous man who went on to lead his country. Most grieved for the passing of a knight and a gentleman. Almost all claimed him as a Geordie.
Wherever he went, to Fulham and Ipswich, with England, to Holland and Portugal and Spain, Robson always carried the North East with him.
Besides the Newcastle tops and the Toon Army scarves, the crosses of St George festooned with the letters NUFC, sat offerings from Sunderland and Middlesbrough, black-and-white and red-and-white united in paying tribute to a son of their soil, evidence of an unofficial cessation of hostilities.
Robson never graced the Gallowgate in Newcastle's monochrome stripes, as he would so dearly have loved to have done, and it was not until the twilight of his managerial career that he was finally given the chance to St James' Park his home, but Robson and Newcastle, city and club, were inseparable.
The coalminer's son from Langley Park, County Durham, who worked as an electrician's apprentice before seeking fame and fortune in London, and eventually further afield, was not just an England international or, arguably, the greatest manager in the club's history.
The crowds were not here to mourn the passing of the last man to make Newcastle fans dream, the man who had taken them into the Champions League. In tears, they came to mourn one of their own.
Robson was a local hero on an international stage, a public standard bearer for all the characteristics which define an industrious, amicable, fiercely proud, highly factional part of England. Grief, though, has no time for boundaries. As one card read, Robson was not just beloved of Newcastle, he was a "legend of the North".
Robson, no doubt, would have regarded that as the highest tribute. He was a man who felt no compunction in telling Steve Harper, like him, a County Durham Geordie, that he would attend Sunderland's final game of the season in May when Newcastle, the side he had supported all his life, were in action at the same time, in a match they had to win to survive in the Premier League.
"He said the people at the Stadium of Light always treated him very well," recalls Harper. "That there are shirts left in tribute from Sunderland and Middlesbrough, Darlington and Hartlepool just shows you what Sir Bobby meant to people here." And further afield, too. Liverpool, Swindon Town, Ipswich and Chelsea were all represented on his makeshift memorial, their shirts attached to seats, as were Barcelona and, of course, England.
Sporting Lisbon, FC Porto and PSV Eindhoven will surely join them over the weekend, as the stream turns into a flood. The gates to the pitch will stand ajar until 5pm on Sunday evening, while a book of condolence has been opened in the bowels of this imposing stadium, transformed into a shrine as soon as the news of Robson's passing broke yesterday morning.
It is an appropriate setting in which the thousands more who will surely come to pay their respects. St James' Park stands in Newcastle, where most cities would place a cathedral, dominating the skyline, a constant reminder of faith.
As a child, Robson, too, made the journey from the pit village to the Gallowgate, and it is a suitable bookend to a life attached to this ground that it should have been here, as recently as Sunday, that he made his last public appearance.
Evidently frail, wearing a trilby to disguise the effects of endless rounds of chemotherapy, he appeared on the pitch in a wheelchair to greet the players in a game held for the charity for which he worked so diligently. Ostensibly, the 35,000 in the crowd had come to watch a re-enactment of the 1990 World Cup semi-final between England and Germany, the apogee of Robson's managerial career. In reality, they had come purely to see Sir Bobby.
Apt, then, that at just after 3pm on Friday, Newcastle's current staff, players and management alike, came to lay a wreath of lilies in his honour. Led out by Harper, Shola Ameobi and Steven Taylor the three survivors of Robson's tenure at the club they gathered around the centre circle for a minute's silence, heads bowed, hands clasped behind their backs.
It was a curiously footballing goodbye, accompanied at its end by the hymns which used to chorus from the stands as Robson led his beloved Newcastle into Europe. He would have wanted nothing more.
