The appointment of Alan Shearer as Newcastle manager with the club in real danger of dropping out of the Premier League raises an interesting question about sporting heroism. Keep them up and Shearer’s legend as a hero without equal on Tyneside will just grow stronger. But if he takes them down, will Shearer become a fallen idol?

Unlikely. Ask any Newcastle fan for their sporting hero and 9 out of 10 will name Shearer. If Newcastle stay up he will get credit whereas if they go down Mike Ashley will get the blame. That’s how idolised he is on Tyneside.

So why do sporting heroes inspire such loyalty, even those (unlike Shearer) who make some pretty dreadful decisions outside sport? Well, think about every pass you’ve fluffed, catch you’ve dropped and putt you’ve missed. That’s why sporting heroes are so important and so cherished to us; they do the things we wish we could, but can’t. And, in doing so, they provide us with memories that linger.

If you’ve taken a look at the Meet the Team section of fastwebmedia.com you’ll have discovered that all our staff have named their sporting hero as part of their profile. And the results make for interesting reading:

50% of our sporting heroes are footballers

12.5% are American

31% are or were based in Manchester

Aside from the footballers there two rugby players, two cricketers, a golfer, a boxer, a horse, and a plasterer from Gloucester who briefly attained fame in the 1980’s for nearly killing himself ski-jumping. A man so inept, in fact, that the IOC changed the rules to stop him competing. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.

The Eagle: Well meaning but essentially inept.

That’s probably because our views of sporting heroism are subjective and not always for the most obvious reasons. For our CEO Mike Flynn, Eric Cantona’s example to the younger players who would follow him at Manchester United was as important as his achievements on the field. My own sporting hero is Malcolm Marshall largely for the way he made lethal fast bowling look so effortless but partly for that time he broke his hand in a test match and then swaggered out (wearing a sun hat rather than a helmet) and proceeded to bat one-handed.

Marshall bats one-handed. The cheek of it

Special mention should also go to the sporting heroes who didn’t make it through the final cut; Neville Southall in our Director of Sales Hugo Sharman’s case with Hugo noting that Carl Lewis is his sporting hero in a ‘photo finish ahead of Neville Southall’. It’s hard to imagine a photo finish between Carl Lewis and Big Nev unless it involved time lapse photography but it’s nice to see that our understanding of what constitutes heroism is more nuanced than just someone who wins everything, every time.

So enough about us; who is your sporting hero or heroine? Tell us, tell us why, make your case – the more eclectic and unusual the better