Word: northerners
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...while the club has lost its focus since Keegan ended a successful first spell as team manager in the mid-'90s, the fans haven't. Rival northern English cities like Liverpool and Manchester host two top-flight football teams. London boasts five. For Geordies, though, it's Newcastle or nothing. And "when they've worked all week, the match for them is like it is for people down south going to the theater," Keegan said before this weekend's game, his first back in charge at St James' Park. "They want to see something special...
...That's especially true in Newcastle right now. The fortunes of its once promising football club - its current standing halfway down the league was bad enough to earn Keegan's predecessor the boot - have fallen in tandem with those of another of the city's institutions: club sponsor Northern Rock. So when the team's players kicked off a run of lackluster results last September, spooked savers across the U.K. began a run of their own on the bank whose roots in Newcastle stretch back 150 years. While the team was losing three of its five games that month, Northern...
...Northern Rock is more than just a bank in this city. While its logo is sewn into the black and white jerseys of Newcastle's players - the bank also sponsors the local rugby and basketball teams - its activities are woven into the fabric of the city, too. Aside from employing thousands of Geordies, the Northern Rock Foundation, which receives 5% of the bank's annual profits, has handed out $350 million over the last decade to more than 1,500 good causes across the northeast. From its $2 million endowment of the gleaming Sage Gateshead concert hall...
...when Northern Rock found itself at the center of the global credit squeeze, locals, many of whom count among the stoic fans of Newcastle United, didn't desert them either. "NOW IT'S YOUR TURN TO HELP" rallied a front-page headline in The Journal. Lines of savers rushing to take back their money were shorter than elsewhere in the country. Many chose to open fresh accounts. And some even bought the bank's shares. "I always had faith in them," says 84-year-old Eleanor County, clutching her pink savings book outside a busy branch of Northern Rock...
...Most Geordies, though, remain anxious about the bank's future. In a last-ditch effort to avoid nationalization, the U.K. government on Monday hatched plans to convert into bonds the $50 billion Bank of England loan it used to prop up Northern Rock. That makes a private sale of the bank more likely: those interested in bidding before the February deadline - including a consortium led by Richard Branson's Virgin Group - will no longer need to front up for a big slice of that loan. The bank's battered shares climbed more than 40% on the news...