On Tuesday night, a few hours before the clock struck 12 and April Fools' Day was upon us, the journalists of an English sports news agency received a casual call from their superiors. Keep an eye out, they were told, for any stories that might be seem a little fishy over the next day or so. Check everything carefully, the boss said, and make sure nobody fools us. We don't want to be caught out.

About an hour before midnight, a journalist from the agency present in Bari for the Ireland game received a call saying Alan Shearer was set to be appointed Newcastle manager. Around the dinner table in the city's old town, the immediate consensus was that this was the first of the hoaxes, and everybody was a little disappointed at how obvious it was. Shearer to Newcastle? The former England captain had already turned down the job twice, he was hardly going to take the reigns at this point in the season with the club in serious danger of going down.

That the story turned out to be true says everything about the laughing stock Newcastle United have become. They are the only club in the country, perhaps even Europe, where genuine news stories are routinely dismissed as pranks, so bizarre do they sound. If somebody at the club was ever to attempt to pull-off an April Fools' Day prank, the story would have to be something of epic peculiarity.

As odd as the whole thing sounds, it has happened but the more you poke around, the clearer it becomes that Newcastle's obsessed and incredibly loyal supporters are the ones being short-changed. And not for the first time. In fact, only two men in a drama with a cast of hundreds of thousands gain from the appointment of Shearer this week. One is the new manager. The other is Mike Ashley.

The Newcastle chairman is so desperate to be liked on Tyneside he'd do anything, quite literally anything, that he thinks might put him in some sort of favour with the locals. When he first bought the club, he used to walk around the city's busy Bigg Market district on a Friday and Saturday night buying rounds for the house in whatever pub he found himself in. When the novelty of all that wore off for the locals, he took the crazy step of appointing Kevin Keegan – a man who at the time was putting all his money and energy into creating a football circus in Glasgow – to lead the club. When that appointment failed, and the supporters asked him to sell up and ship out he announced that he would do exactly that.

At the time, word went around on the grapevine that Ashley had no intention of selling up and was merely taking a step back from the club for a few months until everybody calmed down. That is exactly how things worked out and now that Ashley feels he's in a position to get the supporters back on side again, he's gone out and pulled another populist stunt.

The former Newcastle chairman, Freddie Shepherd, once called Shearer "Mary Poppins"; now the former England captain is Ashley's spoon of sugar designed solely to make the pain of supporting the club a little easier to swallow.

Not that anybody in and around the club seems to recognise that, if the reaction of the past few days is anything to go by. Former Irish international and Newcastle midfielder Mick Martin reckoned that "there could not be a better time to do this given the circumstances". Kevin Sheedy, another Irishman who enjoyed a spell on Tyneside towards the end of his career, felt that Shearer didn't need to have managerial experience to be a success. "When you have been at the top level of the game for club and country," the winger said, "you don't need it."

It's hard to find a dissenting voice in the Newcastle fish bowl and that's why Shearer is the only other man who can gain from this appointed. As he weighed up the decision having met with Ashley on Sunday last, it will surely not have escaped the Match of the Day pundit that he couldn't really lose. If things go belly up, and Newcastle are relegated for the first time since 1989, he will not be absolved from any blame because of his late appointment. If he can get his home-town club out of the mess, however, he will be feted for life.

Either way, Shearer gets a brief taste of management and that will also have influenced the thinking of a man who's clearly a little unsure whether he wants to sit on a couch beside Alan Hansen or in a dug-out beside Iain Dowie. Now he gets a trial run, which started with that 2-0 defeat to Chelsea, and if he doesn't like it he can go back to punditry knowing he'd at least given it a go. He won't die wondering.

It's easy to understand his reticence in signing up to this football management lark. Shearer's generation of footballer have performed appalling in the world of management. Tony Adams will be blessed to resurrect his career again after his calamitous spell with Portsmouth. Gareth Southgate appears odds-on to take Middlesbrough down. Stuart Pearce couldn't hack it at club level and is now operating in the cosy world of under-21 international football. David Platt, meanwhile, couldn't even hack that position. Paul Gascoigne had a 39-day spell in charge of Kettering and Blackburn couldn't get rid of Paul Ince quick enough. In all that failure, there is not so much as one success, not one figure Shearer could look at and attempt to emulate.

Instead, he will depend on the handful of coaching badges he has picked up to date and seek the advice of his former mentors. "I'll be speaking to Kevin [Keegan], I'll be speaking to Kenny [Dalglish], I'll be speaking to Glenn Hoddle, I'll be speaking to Terry [Venables]," he said on Thursday. "I think it's important that I try to tap into all the help I can get." That's an awful lot of phone calls to squeeze in over the next few weeks. Fingers crossed they all answer.

Spare a thought in all of this, though, for Newcastle's support. They are addicts, a set of people utterly devoted to the football club that looms both physically and metaphorically over the city. But like all those of an addictive nature, they are simply unable to see that what they crave most is actually no good for them.

ccronin@tribune.ie