When Eddie Howe called Tuesday’s game with Barcelona the biggest in Newcastle’s history, there was an underlying message to his players beyond what he was actually saying.
He’s right on the one front, that it’s one of the club’s biggest matches on an international level – they’ve never been this far in the European Cup or Champions League before. But I would argue the two recent cup finals against Liverpool and Manchester United were bigger than this.
But really, I think he was trying to ensure playing Barcelona at home doesn’t get lost in what feels like a blur of big games at the moment.
I think Howe wants to ensure his players have drawn a line under the week they’ve just had and are fully focused on Tuesday night. He is well aware the club was fighting on four fronts a few weeks ago and now, really it’s just one.
It’s unlikely they will reach the Champions League through the Premier League so this is the one way of salvaging something tangible from the season.
When you play Man Utd, Man City and now Barcelona at St James’ Park across three competitions in six days, and then have Chelsea, Sunderland and a trip to the Nou Camp to come, it’s an exhausting run.
I’ve never seen anything like it for Newcastle, and it’s right at the end of a brutal schedule where they have not had a free midweek since the November international break. As you’ve probably seen, no team in Europe’s top five leagues has played as many games as Newcastle this season.
It’s been relentless, especially with finishing in the Champions League play-offs. I know people will say they only had to play Qarabag, but that was a 5,000-mile round trip. I think they would have rather drawn Monaco, given the choice.
With those demands, it hasn’t helped that the jury is still out on the summer signings, with the exception of Malick Thiaw.
If all five of those had come in and hit the ground running, we wouldn’t be talking about this run of games in the same way.
New signings struggling
Yoane Wissa has struggled since joining Newcastle in the summer
Howe has largely had to rely on last season’s squad, plus the addition of one or two – Thiaw, and in the last few weeks, Jacob Ramsey has been looking a lot better.
For a long period of time, Ramsey, Nick Woltemade, Yoane Wissa and Anthony Elanga haven’t contributed all that much.
There is a variety of reasons for that. Woltemade and Wissa were panic buys at the end of the window when Alexander Isak finally left. Woltemade doesn’t feel suited to the high-pressing style, and they’re now trying to re-invent the club-record £69m striker as a midfielder.
There are mitigating factors over Wissa; he was signed on Deadline Day and scored 19 goals last season. You would’ve expected he’d be able to go straight into the team and score goals, but he got injured on international duty before he had even kicked a ball on the training pitch.
He doesn’t look confident with his body or fully over that injury, and I think the feeling from within is that he needs a full pre-season.
Now you’ve got some unhelpful injuries – last week was the first time Newcastle won a Premier League game without him in the starting line-up since he arrived in 2022. To have him missing for a couple of months at the business end of the season is a big blow.
They’re obviously missing a couple of others. Lewis Miley got injured just when it felt like he was clicking into gear, and 35-year-old Kieran Trippier has had to play every three days because Tino Livramento’s been injured.
Even Fabian Schar would’ve been brought in to give Thiaw a rest in a few games, but he’s been out for a couple of months.
Why mismanagement at top has cost Newcastle
Newcastle sit 12th in the Premier League
Around the club, there’s an understanding of what Newcastle have been up against with the schedule and the residual damage of the Isak situation last summer, the way it dragged on, and the panic buys that followed.
There’s a frustration from the fans too, who feel like some of these things could have been avoided had Newcastle been more prepared and organised last summer, but it was a mess with no chief executive and sporting director at the start of the window, and it felt like mismanagement from the top.
That left Howe’s nephew Andy essentially as the de facto sporting director, and although within the club everyone felt he did a good job in the circumstances, it was a lot to ask in what was one of Newcastle’s busiest summers in at least a decade.
I thought those issues would come home to roost at some point, and that’s what we’re seeing now.
We have seen with other players Howe has signed that it can take a full year for players to really bed in under him, but it’s not what Newcastle have needed this season with the amount of games they’ve had to play.
Going so far in the Carabao Cup probably didn’t help but when you look at what winning it last season did to the club and the city, you can’t disrespect that competition and because they’re a good team, they got to the semi-final.
Ultimately, you want to win these competitions and Newcastle have got a better chance of doing that than winning the Premier League, but they’re just finding it difficult to do that on four fronts.
But on nights like these at St James’ Park, when everything’s on the line, they can rise to the occasion.
We’ve seen in recent years what they’ve done, like the 4-1 win against PSG.
This season, they’ve kept their best displays for the Champions League, under the lights, that music playing around the stadium.
That will give Howe the hope they can get another positive result on Tuesday – and I think they need one. A defeat or even a draw would leave them too much to do at the Nou Camp, but a victory, even a narrow one, and their season is still alive.
