AS Karl Darlow and Andros Townsend trudged from the field in the wake of Newcastle’s embarrassingly inadequate goalless draw at Villa Park, their eyes were drawn to the giant screen in the corner of the ground.

There, in bright lights that pierced the gathering gloom, shone the words: “Sunderland 3 Chelsea 2”. Townsend shook his head ruefully, Darlow screamed out a flurry of expletives. As an encapsulation of Newcastle’s plight, it was the perfect blend of emotion and farce.

Seven years earlier, on an identical spot, Michael Owen had slumped to his haunches as Damien Duff and Obafemi Martins sloped off behind him with Newcastle’s relegation to the Championship having been confirmed. This time around, the final nail has not quite been driven into the coffin, but with Sunderland needing to win just one of their final two games to confirm their rivals’ demotion, it is only a matter of time. This Newcastle side will almost certainly not survive, and nor do they deserve to.

The parallels to 2009 are stark, and provide a damning indictment of a regime that has clearly learned nothing from its multiple mistakes. For a club with the resources and support of Newcastle to be relegated once can perhaps be considered unfortunate. For it to happen twice in the space of seven seasons smacks of deeply-entrenched mismanagement on a staggering scale.

As Newcastle’s players failed to rouse themselves for a game they simply had to win to have any realistic chance of survival, it was impossible not to glance around the field and conjure up images of the overpaid, uninterested mercenaries who accompanied them into the second tier last time.

For Owen, Martins and Mark Viduka, players whose lack of application was supposedly never going to be repeated, read Papiss Cisse, Moussa Sissoko and Georginio Wijnaldum this time around.

Cisse, with one goal since the end of November, should have been sold years ago when his motivation was initially beginning to wane. Sissoko, whose recent goal against Swansea is his only one of the campaign, barely broke into a trot at the weekend and has consistently underperformed all season. Wijnaldum, the reigning Dutch Footballer of the Year, has shied away from accepting any kind of responsibility as the stakes have gradually increased in the second half of the campaign. Despite shelling out £14.5m, Newcastle have managed to find a Gini without any bottle.

All three will leave if, as looks inevitable, relegation is confirmed, and they will not be missed. The same is true of absent skipper Fabricio Coloccini and midfielder Cheick Tiote, two players who tried their hardest to locate an escape route before the season had even begun. Little wonder Newcastle have been so limp when they have been relying on players who do not even want to be playing for them in the first place.

The rebuilding job will be painful and testing, and there is surely little chance of Rafael Benitez remaining on Tyneside to oversee it. For all that he was unable to inspire the kind of passionate performance that was required at the weekend, the Spaniard has improved things since replacing Steve McClaren in March. But having spent the first half of the current campaign at Real Madrid, he is unlikely to want to kick off next season with a trip to Rotherham.

It is hard not to wonder what might have happened had Benitez arrived sooner, most specifically during the three-week break that preceded defeats to Stoke and Bournemouth and saw McClaren take his squad on a training camp to Marbella. Had Benitez had that time to work with the same players, perhaps things would have been different.

“I don’t think it is fair to say what might have happened if I had come at a different time,” he said at the weekend. “We just have to be ready for what is still to play.”

The decision to stick with McClaren as Newcastle slid into the relegation zone was a catastrophic error, but again there are echoes to the past. Alan Shearer presided over eight games of the 2009 season and was unable to keep the Magpies in the top-flight. By the time his side face Tottenham on Sunday, Benitez will have led them in ten matches. That the outcome is almost certain to be the same should not be a great surprise.

When decisive action was required earlier in the season, it was not forthcoming. But that is what happens when you are led by an absentee owner who appears to have lost all interest in an asset that is now nothing more than a vehicle for free advertising, and who appoints a managing director, Lee Charnley, so far out of his depth that Newcastle are effectively rudderless as a result.

Even if by some miraculous sequence of events, Newcastle manage to remain in the top-flight, there has to be a root-and-branch reform of the club’s executive-level management structure that does not simply entail the installation of another group of Mike Ashley acolytes to roles they are incapable of filling. That hasn’t worked for the last seven years, so why should it do so now?

“You don’t always finish where you deserve to be,” mused Benitez, in the bowels of Villa Park. “Sometimes, you are unlucky, and I think that has been the case with us during my time here. We have been unlucky.”

Unlucky or unacceptably rotten to the core? The evidence overwhelmingly points towards the latter.