Before we begin, there is a message to be passed on, from one former Newcastle United player to another. It is not particularly profound — “Tell him ‘Good luck, bastardo’,” — but it draws a laugh from Nolberto Solano, and then it draws a response. “I know who that is,” he says. “I know. I supplied this guy for many years. It is Mr Alan Shearer.”
As if there was any doubt.
Solano is the winger who left Peru in 1998 to join Newcastle and make a home for himself half a world away. Home it remains, at least as far as football allows. Since the summer, he has been the manager of Pakistan, another twist of the globe in a different direction, but we meet for a coffee and catch up in Gosforth, where he still lives, a couple of miles away from St James’ Park.
“When I moved to English football, everything was very new to me, but I quickly appreciated how perfect it is,” Solano, 50, says. “I loved it. The training ground was amazing. I played for the biggest club in Peru and the facilities were nothing to compare. I’d gone to Boca Juniors in Argentina and everything was quite tough, but here we were training with the ball all the time and I like the ball, I love the ball, so it was like paradise.
“I remember walking around and it was quiet and dark and a little chilly, and I said to my ex-wife, ‘There are no people here, what’s going on with this place?’, then I couldn’t believe it when I went to the stadium and it was loud and mad and we had to play and to fight. Where did all the people come from? But that spoke to me and engaged me because football is my passion. I said to myself, ‘You have to be here forever, because this is a dream’.”
He chuckles again at memories of Shearer, the Premier League’s — and Newcastle’s — record goalscorer. “I can still hear his voice,” he says. “‘Come on Nobby, as soon as you get the ball, whip it in. Don’t check, whip in. Remember: whip, whip’. That was Alan, all the time. If the ball didn’t go to him, even when it was still in the air, he would already be shouting: ‘Nobby, Nobby, COME ON!’. He was a greedy b*****d!
“But what a player, what a striker, what an excellent professional. I was a team player and I loved supplying him; what mattered was him scoring and us winning the game. What a privilege it was to play alongside him.”
Solano and Alan Shearer enjoyed a productive partnership (Jamie McDonald/Getty Images)
Over two spells (he also played for Aston Villa, West Ham United, Leicester City, Hull City and Hartlepool United), Solano made 247 Premier League appearances for the club.
There is a common misconception of Newcastle, perhaps exacerbated by the “cockney mafia” era of Mike Ashley’s ownership, that it is insular or somehow hostile to outsiders. The truth is the opposite. Geordies fall hard for players and managers who make the effort to get to know them, to get them full stop. Think Robert Lee or Les Ferdinand and Rafa Benitez. Think Eddie Howe.
Solano was the neat, accomplished footballer with a wand of a right foot — an artist, rather than a runner — who played a trumpet to entertain his team-mates and threw himself into life on Tyneside, on and off the pitch. In turn, he was adored.
“From day one, it was perfect,” he says. “My English wasn’t the best, but I’m a sociable person and have always had a lot of friends, so I was soon organising barbecues with my neighbours. I hadn’t realised how lively Newcastle could be on a night, because when I first arrived, it was hotel to training to hotel.
“We went out to Uno’s, the Italian restaurant on the quayside, on a Monday night. Afterwards, we came out and there were queues for the nightclubs and the bars. Wow, it’s Monday! What’s happening here?
“My first experience of going for a drink was with Steve Howey and Duncan Ferguson (his Newcastle team-mates). They called themselves the heavyweights. They said ‘Hey, little Peruvian, want to come for a pint?’. Of course, why not? I’m sociable! In Peru, the tradition is that you get a bottle of beer and you share with everyone, with little glasses. Here we went to the Pitcher and Piano. We were only there for 45 minutes, but it was bang, bang, bang, doing the beers like that.
“We went to the next bar and the next. At one point, they bought some whiskey, and I was ‘No, no, no, no, no mixing! Only beer!’. I was mullered. We came out of the bar and I didn’t know where I was and it was dark and my watch said four o’clock. I rang my ex-wife to apologise and to help me get home. ‘I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise it was so late’, I said. ‘What are you talking about?’ she said. I thought it was four in the morning. It was four in the afternoon.
“That day was my welcome.”
(George Caulkin/The Athletic)
If this is a Newcastle kind of story, then so, in a roundabout way, is why he is spending this international break in Pakistan, preparing for an Asian Cup qualifying fixture against Syria.
How did he become manager of a team that stands 198th in FIFA’s world rankings?
“That’s what I’m saying; it’s about being friendly and social,” he says. “And I’ve got a friend and he’s a taxi driver here.”
Perfect; just perfect.
“He was born in Newcastle, but his family is from Pakistan,” Solano says. “Back in the day, he used to pick me up. We’ve kept in touch and he knew I was looking for a job after doing some coaching in Peru with Santos de Nasca in the second division. My friend talked to somebody inside the Pakistan football federation and mentioned my name a few months ago. That was the start of the conversation.”
Initially, Solano was hired to coach the under-23 team with a pathway towards the senior position, but he has already traversed it. Last month, there were home and away draws with Afghanistan. He has a one-year contract and is flitting between Lahore, Islamabad and home.
“It’s a great honour,” he says. “The president of the federation (Mohsen Gilani) is very happy to have me and is very ambitious, and slowly, slowly, we are trying to get better, to get more competitive. The players have responded well. There is a lot of hard work to do; we need to be more organised, but football-wise, it hasn’t been bad. We’ve had a couple of results. It’s not a football country, but the people are so nice and so humble.”
Solano is hoping to use his contacts and reputation in English football to find players who are eligible to represent Pakistan, which has no organised domestic league. “I will start to search, you know?” he says. “This is part of my plan, to get in touch with people and to try to convince them. There are young players at League One and League Two clubs who could join us and help make us better. Playing international football is a huge thing.”
He has spoken to Sonny Perkins, the Leyton Orient forward, who has played for England at youth level but qualifies for Pakistan through his maternal grandmother. “He wasn’t sure about coming over because he had a few issues he wanted to sort out with Leyton Orient, and he wanted to settle down and play regular football there,” Solano said. “I said I will get in contact with him in the future to see how he’s doing.”
Solano is on the lookout for Pakistan-eligible talent, such as Leyton Orient’s Sonny Perkins (Richard Pelham/Getty Images)
For Solano, the challenge and the appeal is to improve players and to work. “It’s really, really hard, but it’s also very special to be with a national team,” he says. “It’s a big responsibility. Like any coach, I would love to be working in the Premier League, but it’s not that easy. I don’t play football anymore, so I have to build my career again, like everybody else. You don’t get many opportunities.
“We play games in some interesting places against some interesting teams. Some of the countries have issues and have been in wars, but I’m fine with that. It’s football and I love football. It would be nice to have the kind of thing Eddie Howe has — three assistants, five analysts, the best training ground in the world — but I understand I need to prove myself. I’m asking myself the question ‘How far can I go as a head coach?’. I’m here for a year, but if everything goes well, I’d have no problem staying and carrying on.”
It has already been a journey. Solano, who began taking his coaching badges at Hull and Hartlepool, was an assistant manager for Peru under Ricardo Gareca when the country he represented 95 times as a player qualified for the 2018 World Cup finals.
“It was such a massive thing, like Newcastle winning the Carabao Cup,” he says. “The head coach was an amazing, fantastic guy; he changed our mentality. We believed. I tried so hard to get there as a player and we came very close in 1998, but it was just too difficult. In Russia, we had France, Denmark and Australia in our group, and that high level of quality and talent was amazing. Kylian Mbappe, Paul Pogba, wow.”
He has coached on his own in the Peruvian leagues and then, last year, there was a truncated, winless stint at Blyth Spartans in the Northern Premier League. “It was another experience, but quite disappointing,” Solano says. “It was six games. When I arrived at training, we only had a few players, so we had to do pre-season with trial players. The club was a mess. I took it knowing it might not be good for my reputation, but what happened was a shame.”
Solano played for Peru 95 times between 1994 and 2009 (Eduardo Verdugo/AFP via Getty Images)
Solano was thrust into a maelstrom when he first arrived at Newcastle, from the end of Kenny Dalglish’s unsatisfactory spell as manager, to civil war under Ruud Gullit, to the twinkling success of Sir Bobby Robson. When he returned to the club in 2005, signed by Graeme Souness, he praised the influence of his “great friend Alan”, saying, “This would not have been possible without him.”
“Some of the early moments were tough,” he says. “I couldn’t understand the Scottish, English and Irish accents in the dressing room, it was difficult with Kenny and with Ruud, and then we had some very happy times with Sir Bobby. It was about survival in those first years, but when you’ve survived, the friendships you build are so strong. I always try to be a human. It’s your work, but the relationships outside of the game were good.”
Solano in action for Newcastle against Arsenal in 1998 (Clive Mason/Allsport)
As a coach, Solano is collegiate rather than confrontational. “I’m a very easy manager,” he says. “I’m not complicated. I don’t like conflict. But I know I can win and I can improve people. I can help the team, I can help young players, I can work with egos. I have a good feeling that I can do well.”
His instinct, his natural desire, is to play attacking football, but he makes a valid point when he talks about the “(Pep) Guardiola system that everybody has copied. Sometimes it gets a little bit boring because everybody plays similar — the Premier League, the Championship, League One — with defenders in the attacking half of the pitch with so much space behind them. It’s crazy.
“I’m 50/50 on it. I like new things, but I still prefer (Newcastle’s) Nick Pope being the goalkeeper and saving goals rather than having to clip the ball to the side.
“Come on, man, go with all respect! If I went to Pakistan tomorrow and tried to play like that, I’d be sacked in three weeks. Sometimes you have to be sensible. Sometimes you have to play safe.”
Understandably, he longs for the return of right-sided wingers whipping in crosses for centre-forwards.
“No club plays with wingers anymore,” he says. “It’s three strikers; left side, right side, middle. At the same time, they put left-footers on the right side — Alan wouldn’t like that! He wouldn’t be happy! All those players, like Mo Salah or Lionel Messi, they can go inside and put it in the net, so it’s hard for the No 9s, and that’s why they’ve started to disappear. Erling Haaland is one of the survivors, but there aren’t many.
“I loved watching Jacob Murphy keep it simple for Newcastle last season, whipping it, crossing it for Alexander Isak. I’m not an expert on this, but I’ve got a feeling the No 9 and the wingers will come back because I can’t believe defenders still don’t understand that these guys on the right or left are going to go bloody inside! It’s more appealing, it’s better, to swing the ball in. I think that system will be back.”
He was born in Lima and works in Lahore, but Solano describes himself as “an adopted Geordie”. He talks like one and thinks like one.
“First of all, the people are wonderful here,” he says. “It doesn’t matter who you are, you don’t need to be a celebrity for people to make you feel welcome. Summer may only last three days, but I’ve adapted to that. I was lucky enough to play for one of the greatest clubs. I stopped playing for Newcastle 18 years ago, but the way people treat me when I’m walking in the street, it could have been yesterday. Wherever I go, I’m very proud that this is my home.”