Alan Shearer is set to be named manager of Newcastle with Iain Dowie lined up to join his backroom staff.

The 38-year-old Newcastle legend will be appointed until the end of the season and charged with keeping his boyhood club in the Premier League.

If successful, sources on Tyneside expect him to become the full-time successor to Joe Kinnear, who has been sidelined following a heart bypass operation.

Shearer has been working as a BBC expert since retiring as a player three years ago and would have come into regular contact with fellow pundit and former Southampton team-mate Dowie.

The former Northern Ireland striker has been out of coaching since being sacked by Queens Park Rangers last October.

Ahead of his formal appointment, Shearer was today hailed as the man to save Newcastle by the former chairman who brought him to Tyneside as a player.

Sir John Hall paid £15million to sign Shearer from Blackburn in 1996 and feels he is the only man who can now save the club from relegation.
The club have slipped to third bottom of the table — two points from safety — and Shearer will begin the survival fight at home to Chelsea on Saturday.

Hall, Newcastle life president, said: “I'm delighted at the news, although it is not the circumstances I'd have preferred him to come back. I'd have preferred him to come back as long-term manager, because I've always felt he was the only man at this moment in time who could manage Newcastle. He's the most dedicated professional I've ever known in my time in the game.

“These are desperate measures for desperate times. There is a gap opening up at the bottom of the table. He'll galvanise all the fans, let's hope he galvanises all the players — because if it doesn't happen on the park then we'll go down.”

The former striker's arrival is a massive boost for the club's long-suffering supporters, whose team are threatened with relegation for the first time in 20 years.

Shearer is said to be “excited” by the challenge, but it is bad news for Guus Hiddink's Chelsea, who travel to the North East on Saturday for what they hoped would be an easy game against a side in decline. It now will be played out in a carnival atmosphere. Mark Jensen, of Newcastle United fanzine The Mag, said: “It's amazing what a feel-good factor can do — one like Kevin Keegan harnessed. It will get everyone moving in the right direction.

“I do think the odds were against us staying up before and that has turned the other way now. To me Alan Shearer is the man who can turn it around. We have three or four games that look winnable and three or four, like Chelsea, that look difficult. But that's not normally how it works out. And now we have to look at them all as winnable.”

Shearer takes over the role from former Tottenham stars Chris Hughton and Colin Calderwood, who have been in temporary charge while Kinnear recovers from heart surgery. The
Ex-Wimbledon boss has already hinted he may take a job upstairs' at the end of the season.

Another former chairman and Newcastle fan, Freddie Shepherd, was also delighted with Shearer's return. He said: “It's great news.

Newcastle are in a fight now, they're in the trenches, and I think Alan is the guy to carry on that fight. No matter where you go in the world everybody wants to know about Newcastle.”

Shearer's fellow BBC pundit and former Newcastle coach Mark Lawrenson added: “If anyone can lift Newcastle out of the doldrums it's Alan. He's got no experience of management but people like Jurgen Klinsmann and Franz Beckenbauer at Germany came in with no experience as well. He is regarded as a god up there in Newcastle.”