These were the nights Asprilla came alive.<\/p>\n
Indeed, it did not feel a coincidence that the striker scored as many goals (nine) for Newcastle in 11 European games as he did in 48 Premier League fixtures.<\/p>\n
Yet Asprilla’s top-flight debut was one to remember following his \u00a36.7m move from Parma in February 1996.<\/p>\n
The new signing was not scheduled to play so soon after touching down in the snow in a fur coat a few days previously.<\/p>\n
He even helped himself to a glass of red wine with his pre-match meal before the game against Middlesbrough.<\/p>\n
But Kevin Keegan, who was Newcastle’s manager at the time, felt moved to throw on his record signing after watching his side go 1-0 down at the Riverside.<\/p>\n
Asprilla duly set up Steve Watson’s equaliser and the maverick’s rubber legs helped turn the game on its head as the league leaders ran out 2-1 winners.<\/p>\n
“As soon as he came in, he made the difference,” Albert said. “Only the great players can do something like this.”<\/p>\n
It gave Keegan food for thought at a critical juncture of the title race.<\/p>\n
Newcastle had won seven of their eight previous top-flight fixtures, but Keegan was privately concerned that his side were becoming a little predictable.<\/p>\n
So the Newcastle manager tweaked his starting line-up to accommodate Asprilla.<\/p>\n
Gillespie recalled how the “balance of the team changed” as the Northern Irishman dropped out and Peter Beardsley moved over to the right.<\/p>\n
“Going from the 4-4-2 we played, Peter was not a winger,” he said. “Peter was not going to do what I did and go down the line and get crosses in for the likes of Les [Ferdinand] in the middle.<\/p>\n
“But it was probably easy to drop me. I was the youngest player in the squad and I wasn’t one to go knocking on doors and being confrontational with managers.”<\/p>\n
Gillespie, however, made it clear that Newcastle had signed “two great players” in Asprilla and fellow mid-season arrival David Batty, and he instead gave Manchester United “credit for the way they came back with that run”.<\/p>\n
The pair became easy targets for outsiders after Newcastle went on to lose out on the title to Manchester United, who won 13 of their final 15 league games.<\/p>\n
But Keegan felt it was “scandalous” to blame Batty and Asprilla and instead pointed to a number of key players losing form.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"These were the nights Asprilla came alive. Indeed, it did not feel a coincidence that the striker scored…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":165293,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-165292","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165292","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=165292"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/165292\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/165293"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=165292"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=165292"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=165292"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}