Newcastle Could Have Changed The English Game Forever!

Kegan: "It remains the regret of all football when you talk to people. They don't have to be Newcastle fans.

"It's everybody other than the Manchester United fans - and there are quite a lot of them - who come to you and say, 'if only your team had won the league that year, you would have changed the thinking of football'.

"And I think we would have done. The belief that you could not play that way and win anything, we almost bucked the trend.

"But in the end, because we didn't, people were still able to say, 'look, we told you you couldn't win playing that way'.

"Yes, it was disappointing at the end of the day, but the pluses far out-weighed the minuses.

"But we didn't have any silverware to show for it, and this club needed something like that so people didn't keep saying it's 50 years, 60 years since we won anything.

"We were not able to put that to bed, but we made a lot of friends and we played a brand of football that, strangely enough, teams like Arsenal and Manchester United are playing now.

"I don't know how Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho have fared against Alex - I don't check records - but I can think of at least three, maybe four times when we have beaten them with teams.

"It is not easy to beat Manchester United ever, and a 5-0, and a 4-1 and a 3-1 with Manchester City, I remember.

"But this is a different time, a different era. We are probably different people to the guys we were 12 years ago when we were after the title."