IT was a goal that was good enough to win any game, and the players involved in scoring it perfectly encapsulate what Rafael Benitez has achieved at Newcastle United.

A passing move that swept from one end of the pitch to the other started with Jamaal Lascelles receiving the ball facing his own goal. Lascelles, Benitez’s trusted skipper and lieutenant, calmly laid the ball off to Fabian Schar, a £3m summer signing plucked from the Spanish second division.

Schar floated the ball down the line to Ayoze Perez, a player Benitez has stuck with even though some of the 25-year-old’s own fans appear to have concluded he is not good enough to play for Newcastle.

Perez played a deft inside pass to the onrushing Javier Manquillo, relegated with Sunderland, but given a new lease of life when Benitez recruited him from the reserve ranks of Atletico Madrid.

Manquillo, stationed at right wing-back after Benitez reshuffled his defence to cover for the loss of both DeAndre Yedlin and Federico Fernandez, played a square ball into the path of Salomon Rondon.

Rondon, who joined Newcastle on loan from relegated West Brom this summer when no one else in the Premier League wanted to take a chance on him, held his run to remain onside, and calmly rolled a first-time shot past Huddersfield goalkeeper Jonas Lossl.

Five players involved in the move; five players who were signed for a cumulative total of around £15m, even if you include the fee for Rondon’s season-long loan. By way of comparison, that is the same price Championship side Middlesbrough paid to sign Britt Assombalonga.

Benitez has improved all five of Saturday’s match-winners, so goodness only knows what the Newcastle boss would be able to achieve if he was trusted with a meaningful sum of money in the transfer market.

That is why the ongoing takeover talk continues to offer the tantalising prospect of a much brighter future. Under the current regime, scratching out one-goal wins at Huddersfield is the extent of Newcastle’s ambition, and as surely even Mike Ashley would have to concede, even that would not be possible were it not for Benitez’s managerial mastery.

Under new ownership, though, who knows? If Benitez can organise and motivate this team to claim 13 points from the last seven matches, a run that has lifted the Magpies six points clear of the bottom three, who knows what would be possible with better players and a functioning transfer policy. Peter Kenyon, Garry Cook, a myriad of unknown American hedge-fund managers – the ball is in your court.

“It is a long season, a long-distance race, and we have to carry on,” said a typically phlegmatic Benitez, in the wake of his side’s latest win. “We will enjoy the next couple of days but then, after, we will concentrate on Fulham and we will not see the table. We just need to think about getting another three points, that’s it.”

Benitez’s refusal to get too caught up in takeover talk is understandable given the tumultuous way in which Amanda Staveley’s interest collapsed so disruptively last winter, and it is to the Spaniard’s credit that he has engineered such a marked improvement in the last month in the face of so much uncertainty.

That is what he does best, instilling organisational clarity into his players, and not for the first time this season, Newcastle’s tactical approach was one of their biggest strengths as they stretched their unbeaten away run to four matches, their best Premier League sequence on the road since 2012.

The decision to play with three centre-halves was vindicated from the off, with Lascelles, Schar and Ciaran Clark completely neutering the threat of Huddersfield’s physical lone striker, Laurent Depoitre.

Mo Diame and Ki Sung-yueng shut down their opponents’ supply line from the heart of midfield, and it only took quarter-of-an-hour or so for it to become evident that Huddersfield’s threat would be limited to a supply of aimless balls into the box.

Martin Dubravka made a spectacular first-half save from Phillip Billing, acrobatically tipping over the midfielder’s goal-bound free-kick, and left his line to positive effect throughout the second half. Huddersfield boasted more than 70 per cent of possession, so it says much about the quality of Newcastle’s defending that they rarely looked like getting into the penalty area, let alone scoring a goal.

The question was whether Newcastle could be clinical enough to stage a smash-and-grab raid, and the answer came courtesy of Rondon’s fourth goal in the last six league games.

Benitez was adamant he wanted to sign the Venezuelan this summer, persuading those above him to sign off on a loan deal when their initial attempts to agree a permanent transfer collapsed.

It has taken Rondon a month or two to settle in to life on Tyneside, with his acclimatisation hardly being helped by a niggling injury issue, but in the last month or so, he has provided the kind of physical attacking presence that has been conspicuous by its absence in the last few years.

Crucially, Rondon can also finish, and whatever does or not does happen in terms of a takeover, Newcastle will surely make a full-time move for the 29-year-old a key priority when his loan deal expires at the end of the season.

“It (a permanent transfer) will be fine,” said Benitez. “Hopefully, he can start scoring a lot of goals, and then you can ask me this in a few weeks and hopefully it can be positive then, too.

“He hasn’t really surprised me because we knew him quite well. We knew that he could do what he is doing. Still he can improve, and he will work hard to try and improve.

“To have different kinds of strikers means that you can use them in different ways. His strength maybe is to hold the ball sometimes, and we needed that against Huddersfield because we had to defend. We knew they would be pushing and with the big lads that they have, we knew they’d be making crosses all the time.

“The only way to defend crosses - some people say, ‘Oh you’re high, oh, you’re deep’ - but when you have crosses, you have to defend.

“But if you don’t push up and don’t regain the ball because the centre-back cannot clear the cross, then you have to go back and defend.

“You cannot be high all the time when you don’t have the ball. So to have a striker who can hold the ball, it gives you time to go forward and, in this case, create counter-attacks.”