MICHAEL WALKER A YEAR ON THE WEARNewcastle-born Michael Chopra returns to St James' Park tomorrow as a Sunderland player and hopes to get a good reception. However, he shouldn't hold his breath
IT HAS been building for about a month now, creeping into conversations, then dominating them. As each week has passed there have been more and more and as of Monday morning it was all people could talk about. Neither team gets mentioned, it's just all about "the derby".
A month ago it looked like either Sunderland's or Newcastle's Premier League future could rest upon what happens at St James' Park tomorrow afternoon. Three wins for Sunderland and four for Newcastle have altered the game's potential impact, and yet if down the road at Middlesbrough, Bolton were to win this afternoon, Sunderland, in particular, might feel Bolton's breath as kick-off arrives.
That derbies are derbies is the cliché of clichés - form book out the window, all that stuff has been mentioned - but there is a certain truth in the unpredictability of days like these. Who copes best as much as who plays best, there does seem to be something in that and as he walks into St James' foyer, past the new bust of Bobby Robson, how Michael Chopra is coping with it all will be more interesting than almost anything else. Chopra, Newcastle-born and Newcastle-daft, will enter as a Sunderland player.
The stick Chopra will receive because of this will be incessant and a lot of it unpleasant. The Sunderland Echo this week referred to St James' as "a cauldron of noise and hate". Down the decades quite a few players and managers have crossed the 12-mile divide from Wearside to Tyneside in both directions. Chris Waddle, Michael Bridges and Lee Clark have all been recent converts while the most famous of all stands everyday outside the Stadium of Light, arms aloft.
Bob Stokoe was born in Newcastle-supporting Northumberland and was a black and white centre-half FA Cup-winner; he is in bronze on Wearside for leading Sunderland to the 1973 FA Cup. His assistant that day was one Arthur Cox, soon to be Newcastle manager and Kevin Keegan's mentor, now assistant.
So Chopra is doing nothing new. But it still matters. Chopra will not have thought otherwise but if he did think some of the sting had been taken out of his move from Cardiff to Sunderland last summer, then what might be termed a "vigorous tussle" with former contemporary Steven Taylor during the season's first derby will have, as they say in the North-east, put him straight.
Optimistically, Chopra said yesterday: "I would hope I would get a good reception. I think most people realised when I left Newcastle to go to Cardiff that I had to do it because I wasn't really getting many first-team chances on Tyneside. But whenever I did play for Newcastle, I always gave 100 per cent - just as I do now for Sunderland. As for me going back to St James's Park as a Sunderland player, I'm sure the Newcastle fans know I am here for footballing reasons - who you support doesn't come into it."
Recently 24, Chopra joined Newcastle when he was nine. On that night in 1996 when Newcastle put five past Manchester United at St James', Chopra was one of the ball-boys. He was one of those youth football scoring machines then. He scored buckets for Newcastle and for England at various age groups, including two for England under-20s at the Stadium of Light. The word was that Newcastle had unearthed another Shearer and had kept hold of him.
But Shearer's presence was both an inspiration and an obstacle. Craig Bellamy and Shola Ameobi were other impediments to Chopra making the progress from reserves to first-team regular. "It was hard for me at Newcastle when Souness was there because he didn't really fancy me," Chopra said. "He told me to wait my turn but I was always overshadowed by other players. It was disappointing because sometimes Kieron Dyer, who was a midfielder, would get played up front. That was hard to take."
So he went to Watford, Nottingham Forest and Barnsley on loan and did what he does, scored goals - five in five at Watford, 17 in 39 at Barnsley. But there was still no Newcastle goal. When Chopra finally did get one it was in mid-July in rural Slovakia in an Intertoto Cup game that the wider world did not care about.
Disappointment, you felt, had set in by then and he must have known he would have to leave his beloved Geordies.
Which is what Chopra did the summer before last, though not before at last registering his one and only Premier League goal in a Newcastle kit. At Sunderland.
The nature of his celebration that day at the Stadium of Light was such that when he left Cardiff for Sunderland, Newcastle's official website replayed his goal and joy for anyone who wanted to click on. Some annoyed Sunderland fans thought this was Roy Keane's Mo Johnston moment. "I don't care if he's from Newcastle or New Zealand," was Keane's response to them.
Elsewhere the consternation focused on the £5 million fee Sunderland had paid to Cardiff for Chopra when he had been allowed to leave Newcastle for nothing. But then came that opening day of the season against Tottenham and Chopra - on as a substitute, a reprise of his Newcastle days - scored a cool, explosive injury-time winner.
"I think they love me now," he said of Sunderland fans. In return they began to sing: "He's one of us, he's one of us." A goal tomorrow at St James', where Chopra never scored a senior goal, would cement that relationship and shatter the other."
