The Magpies head to east London tonight for their final game before Sunday’s Carabao Cup final with Liverpool, but their preparation for both games has been badly hampered by injury and suspension issues.
Lewis Hall will miss the rest of the season after damaging a bone in his foot, Sven Botman requires knee surgery that will sideline him for a couple of months and Anthony Gordon has been hit with a three-match ban in the wake of his dismissal in the FA Cup defeat to Brighton.
There has been an air of despondency hanging over the Newcastle camp ever since they crashed out of the cup at the fifth-round stage, but with a Wembley final on the horizon and European qualification via the league still a strong possibility, Howe has been accentuating the positive ahead of tonight’s game with the Hammers.
“A positive has to come from this for us to have any chance of being successful in the next few weeks,” said the Magpies boss. “There is no question of us feeling sorry for ourselves.
“We believe in ourselves and we believe in the group. We believe in how we play and how we work. I believe in the characters of the players. I believe we’ve got a really special team and a special group of people. But we need to come together.
“After the Brighton game, that was a really difficult feeling for 48 hours. But there is always a new day and a new way of looking at the same situation. For me, I look at it as, ‘Can I find answers to the problems? Then, can we fight back even stronger?’”
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The build-up to next weekend’s final has parallels to the situation two years ago, when the narrative ahead of Newcastle’s Carabao Cup final with Manchester United was dominated by Nick Pope’s suspension and the lack of goalkeeping cover.
This time around, it is Newcastle’s left-hand side that has been badly weakened ahead of Wembley, with Hall and Gordon both missing, but Howe insists the scale of the problems facing the Magpies should not be overplayed.
“It's part of the game,” he said. “If you actually look at it in isolation, we've got three injured players in our squad. There’s Jamal Lascelles, Sven Botman, Lewis Hall, and we've got one player suspended. By any team in the Premier League, that's not huge numbers.
“The challenge we have is we have a very small squad, as we've said all season. But our job now is to make the players that we do have fit and available feel as good as they can so we can start winning again.”
And while there will inevitably be plenty of focus on Wembley, Howe insists the current priority has to be the game with West Ham.
“It's a huge game for us and I think that can't be lost,” he said. “We can't get distracted, we can't lose the focus on the Premier League. I know all the talk will be of the game after West Ham, but for me, the focus this week has been very good from the players. I've been really pleased.”