Have Newcastle United become too nice?
Speak to those inside the dressing room at St James’ Park and it feels like a genuine concern. Once regarded as such an irritant that rules were changed to head off some of their dark arts, the fear is that Eddie Howe’s side have lost some of the edge that accompanied them when they crashed the Premier League elite.
These are the kind of growing pains that come when you attempt to turbocharge a club’s progress. Newcastle were once the upstarts, feeding off a perceived lack of respect from England and Europe’s best clubs. But that tag no longer applies and the Magpies are attempting to forge a new identity.
Perhaps in the rush to do it, they have lost some of the street smarts that helped them get there in the first place.
“You can still have an underdog mentality when you’re not the underdog,” Dan Burn said on Tuesday.
“Even the best teams in the world do it and it’s something we need to think about.”
Eddie Howe knows the pressure is on to turn their performances around (Photo: Getty)
Try this for size; on Sunday, with the game clearly running away from them, Newcastle attempted to play their way out of West Ham’s clutches.
Perhaps a reversion to the days when goalkeeper Nick Pope would conveniently require treatment whenever the Magpies needed to disrupt the rhythm of opponents would have been just what the doctor ordered.
“We were well-known a few years ago for – I won’t say the word but something -housery – and probably a lot of the stuff that has come in has pushed us away from that,” Burn said.
“I think probably the first year we qualified for the Champions League we were more of an underdog and teams probably didn’t respect us as much as they should. You saw it with Nottingham Forest last year, teams turning up and expecting to beat them.
“We could go ugly and bully teams and that was the way we went about it, but as you progress and want to push on, you move away from that, because you bring in better quality players and play better football, but there’s always a place for that in the game.
“Arsenal are quite good at doing that but are playing very good football and are top of the league. It’s important you mix things up but sometimes, especially on Sunday, we have been a little bit too nice when we could have been a bit more compact and resilient.”
There is definitely something in it. Late goals shipped against Arsenal, Liverpool and Brighton – when perhaps an earlier incarnation of Howe’s side would have sensed danger and disrupted the game by any means necessary – have cost them dearly in the Premier League.
Newcastle sit in 13th in the table but are sixth in Opta’s expected points standings. They are not coming out on the right side of the fine margins and are underachieving because of it.
Experienced heads led the inquest into the West Ham debacle. Burn didn’t raise his voice in the dressing room afterwards – admitting his own performance wasn’t good enough for him to carry that authority – but Howe made them sit through a heavy video analysis session at the start of the week.
They want to become a team that controls games rather than continually counter-attacks but there’s an acknowledgement that, away from home in particular, they need to get back to basics.
It all adds up to a strange atmosphere at St James’ Park. Newcastle can take a huge stride towards qualifying for at least the Champions League play-offs by beating an out-of-form Athletic Bilbao on Wednesday night and that would be a big sign of progress – not to mention a lucrative step that will help with the club’s ongoing tussle with profitability and sustainability rules (PSR).
But such is the weird feeling around the club that the challenge of going to Brentford on Sunday and ending their away day woes seem to be jostling with a big European night for relevance.
“It’s very easy to get up for these Champions League nights,” Burn admitted. “But Brentford on Sunday is where you need to earn your money.”
Evolving from a club that have mastered the art of playing one game a week to a superpower capable of switching from Premier League to Champions League is a big part of Newcastle’s challenge.
Unlike in 2023, the squad is deep enough for Howe to rotate and not lower the quality of the starting XI significantly. But form in the Premier League has proved stubbornly mediocre.
“I think it’s a mental challenge not a physical one,” Howe said of their contrasting form in the cups and the league. “I think West Ham was a mental challenge and we failed it.”
Moving onto nine points from four games in the Champions League would be a major boost. But the nagging feeling is that we will only know whether this has been a good week when the final whistle sounds at Brentford.
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