NEWCASTLE UNITED have spent the last seven months trying to safeguard their Premier League status – in the space of seven mesmeric minutes at Turf Moor, Allan Saint-Maximin might just have settled their relegation battle once and for all.

The Magpies were still deep in the mire when Steve Bruce turned to both the Frenchman and Callum Wilson in the 57th minute of yesterday’s game with Burnley, trailing to Matej Vydra’s first-half opener and smarting from referee Anthony Taylor’s failure to award a penalty when James Tarkowski’s high boot caught Sean Longstaff in the face.

A fraught end to the season beckoned, but within seven minutes of being on the field, Saint-Maximin had turned both this game and perhaps the rest of Newcastle’s season on its head.

First, with his first meaningful touch, he twisted and turned in the area before slipping the ball to Jacob Murphy, who rifled the equaliser into the top corner.

Then, just five minutes later, he picked up the ball from Jonjo Shelvey just inside the Burnley half and set off galloping forward. With two Burnley defenders backing off, he advanced towards the edge of the area, and after turning inside Tarkowski, he lashed a low finish past Bailey Peacock-Farrell.

It was a brilliant goal, and it means Newcastle are now six points clear of 18th-placed Fulham and still have a game in hand on the Cottagers. They are not safe yet, but things are looking an awful lot better than they were one week earlier, when the Magpies briefly dropped into the bottom three as Fulham were beating Aston Villa.

Newcastle boasted other impressive performers yesterday, most notably goalkeeper Martin Dubravka, who made crucial saves either side of half-time and relieved the pressure on those in front of him by punching and catching a succession of crosses as Burnley became increasingly desperate in the closing stages. For the second game in a row, Sean Longstaff put in a tireless shift at the heart of midfield that was important.

Ultimately, though, this was all about Saint-Maximin. Bruce has long maintained that Newcastle are a different proposition with their talismanic Frenchman on the field; on this evidence, he is absolutely right. Provided he and Wilson remain fit for the final month of the season, the Magpies should be more than okay.

It didn’t look that way while they were on the bench yesterday, with Newcastle struggling for the majority of the first half. With Jamaal Lascelles unavailable because of the foot injury that looks like ending his campaign, Bruce was forced into a defensive reshuffle. He opted to stick with the five-man backline he had introduced against Tottenham, swapping Lascelles and Emil Krafth for Federico Fernandez and Ciaran Clark, but from the outset, Newcastle looked uncomfortable when faced with Burnley’s direct attacking threat.

There is nothing especially inventive about the Clarets’ preferred form of getting the ball forward – the midfield tends to be bypassed in favour of an aerial route in to Chris Wood – but when Sean Dyche’s team get things right, they can be a hard side to contain.

That was the case for the opening half-hour yesterday, with Fernandez forced into a desperate sixth-minute slide to block a goal-bound effort from Vydra and Clark looking increasingly ragged as Burnley’s midfielders squeezed up to pressurise the Magpies’ backline.

Clark was playing as the central of Newcastle’s three centre-halves, and was twice at fault as Burnley claimed the lead in the 18th minute.

The Irishman’s weak defensive header flew straight to Josh Brownhill, who slipped the ball to Wood on his left. To compound his initial error, Clark then backed away from the Burnley striker, enabling him to burst on his outside and cut the ball back from close to the byline. Wood’s pull-back was perfectly-positioned for Vydra, who was left with the simple task of steering home a first-time shot from close to the penalty spot.

Newcastle had carried no threat at all to that stage, with Jacob Murphy and Matt Ritchie proving especially wasteful in their respective wing-back positions, but the Magpies improved as the first half wore on and were denied by two refereeing decisions in the latter stages of the opening period. The first was a correct call, but the second was far more controversial.

First, Gayle was adjudged to be offside when he prodded home from close range after Joelinton’s miscued shot had skewed into his path. In real time, the striker looked well offside, but replays subsequently showed that it was a much closer call as Burnley’s defenders had been slow to push out. Nevertheless, VAR got that one right.

What happened three minutes later was much less clear-cut, with Newcastle being denied what should surely have been a penalty. Gayle came close to scoring when his side-footed volley from Murphy’s cross was saved by Bailey Peacock-Farrell, but Sean Longstaff looked primed to head home the rebound as he rose between the penalty spot and six-yard line.

Had he got to the ball, he would have scored, but instead his progress was halted by the swinging boot of a turning James Tarkowski. The Burnley defender might have made a degree of contact with the ball, but his boot was extremely high and his intervention surely represented dangerous play. Referee Anthony Taylor didn’t think so, and while VAR examined the incident, the on-field decision stood. Understandably, Newcastle’s players were furious at the denial of a spot-kick.

The first half ended with Martin Dubravka making a smart diving save after Paul Dummett sliced a clearance towards his own goal, and Newcastle’s Slovakian goalkeeper was called into action again at the start of the second half as he tipped Matthew Lowton’s 20-yard drive over the crossbar. It proved an important intervention, as from that moment, it became the Saint-Maximin show.

With pretty much his first touch of the ball, the Frenchman tied up two Burnley defenders in the penalty area and wriggled his way to the byline before pulling the ball back into Murphy’s path.

The wing-back took aim, and hammered a first time strike across Peacock-Farrell and into the far corner. It was quite a finish, securing Murphy’s third goal of the season, a more than reasonable tally given that he has only started 12 matches and a significant proportion of his appearances have come in defence.

Five minutes later, and Saint-Maximin was claiming his winner. Picking the ball up off Jonjo Shelvey, he dribbled his way from the halfway line with Burnley’s defenders standing off him. He wriggled past Tarkowski when the Clarets centre-half tried to engage him in a tackle, and swept home a clinical finish from the edge of the 18-yard box.

His dancing celebration summed up Newcastle’s collective mood, and he almost set up a third goal in the final minute when he broke clear again before squaring the ball into Miguel Almiron’s path.

The Paraguayan fired a low effort towards goal, but a back-tracking Tarkowski was able to hack the ball clear from just in front of the goalline.