Since his retirement in 2006, Alan Shearer has become a football pundit – seen regularly on Match of the Day ­­– save for a hiatus towards the end of the 2008-09 season, when he took over the management of Newcastle United, in a futile bid to prevent their relegation from the Premier League.

Previous career highlights included 62 England caps; two record-breaking transfers, from Southampton to Blackburn Rovers for £3.6m and from Rovers to Newcastle for £15m; winning the Premiership with Rovers in 1995; and becoming Newcastle’s all-time top scorer in 2007, eclipsing by six goals Jackie Milburn’s record haul of 200. Added to which, he was appointed OBE in 2001.

His ascent to super-stardom began with a First Division fixture at The Dell v Arsenal in April 1988. Following two cameos as a sub, the 17-year-old Alan’s full debut was marked with a 4-2 victory, in which he became the Football League’s youngest ever hat-trick scorer, beating Jimmy Greaves’s record.

He had been spotted at 13, playing for Wallsend Boys Club, by Lawrie McMenemy’s eyes-and-ears in the north-east, Jack Hixon. Aged 15, Alan signed on as a trainee at The Dell, preferring Southampton to his home-town Newcastle for reasons explained in his autobiography: he “loved the people there…the coaching was superb”; and he “owed” it to Hixon.

Manager Chris Nicholl advised him to use his substantial backside, “just like Kenny Dalglish and Mark Hughes,” to “hold off defenders”. Indeed, on becoming a first-team regular, it was holding and laying the ball off to create space and opportunities for others – principally Rod Wallace and Matt Le Tissier in the system explained in the latter’s profile, that distinguished his game.

Alan’s work-rate was phenomenal and his unselfishness – as measured by making goals for others, while rarely scoring himself – was remarkable, especially when hindsight enables us to appreciate his goal-scoring ability.

A “perfect storm” of three events in the summer of 1991 changed all that: Wallace left for Leeds; Nicholl was replaced by Ian Branfoot; and Alan flourished, under Ray Harford’s management, as the England U-21s won the international tournament in Toulon, with Alan the top-scorer and player-of-the-tournament. Branfoot duly deployed Alan in 1991-92 the way that Harford had, as a striker running the channels, with Iain Dowie now the target-man. The goal-scoring pattern of recent seasons was reversed: Shearer top-scored and Le Tissier was nowhere.

No wonder Alan pays tribute, in his in his autobiography, to Branfoot, with whom it was a pleasure to work, “because he played to my strengths.” The re-invented Shearer won his first full cap, in February 1992, when he scored in a 2-0 win v France. But then Branfoot, who has admitted that he would have preferred to sell Le Tissier, was obliged to sell Shearer.

The contest to buy him was won by Blackburn, where Harford was the assistant-manager. Neglectful of his selfless contribution to some exciting attacking football under Nicholl and of the club’s need to sell him, there were fans who reacted angrily to Alan’s departure – as a sack-full of abusive mail testified – but his dedication, professionalism, passion and courage, coupled with an ability to be both a target-man (big bum and all) and a “goal-machine” (as Jason Tomas titles his biography of Alan) surely mark him out as one of the country’s greatest post-war centre-forwards.