A YEAR-AND-A-HALF on, and for many, it is still the defining moment of Steve Bruce’s Newcastle United reign. When the Magpies crashed to a 5-0 defeat at Leicester City in Bruce’s seventh league game in charge of the club in September 2019, their recently-appointed manager witnessed the kind of all-encompassing implosion that he has not been able to eradicate in his 65 matches since.

A “hand-grenade moment” is how he has subsequently come to describe it, with his side effectively throwing in the towel in the meekest manner imaginable. It happened against Leeds United in the first half of this season, and against Brighton in March.

At the King Power, last season, Bruce attributed his side’s collapse to an inability to move away from the tactics that had been adopted under Rafael Benitez, and for all that he has attempted to shift mindsets in the 20 months since, it is telling that when Newcastle return to Leicester tomorrow, they will line up in the same five-man defensive system, and with quite a few of the same personnel, as when Benitez was managing in the closing stages of his reign.

Yet the tendency of Newcastle’s players to throw in the occasional horror-show cannot be adequately explained by tactics alone. As Bruce concedes, it goes deeper than that, yet identifying a lack of consistency is one thing, adequately addressing it is quite another. Bruce is right when he states that the Magpies are not the only side to suffer from inconsistent displays; few of their rivals, though, are as utterly dreadful when things go awry.

“The biggest problem of any team in the bottom half of the division is inconsistency,” said Bruce. “The big teams with big players play at the top end of the league because they can stay there week in and week out. The reason why we’re in the bottom half of the division is inconsistency of all the teams.

“If you’re in the bottom half, we’re not alone in striving for that consistency. When we play well, and we’ve played well of late, we get the points we have done. But we didn’t play well enough last week, for example, against Arsenal. We slipped below the standard of what we’d set the week before, and the week before that.

“That, for me, is why you are in the bottom half of the Premier League. We purr at the performances of Chelsea and Man City in the last couple of nights, but the reason why they’re where they are, the reason why they’re top players, is that week in, week out, they perform to that certain level. That’s what you’ve got to strive for, but we’re not alone in it. There’s eight clubs around us who, throughout the season, have found that inconsistency, which is obviously the reason why you are where you are.”

A month or so ago, Newcastle’s back-to-back matches against Leicester and Manchester City looked like being potentially fatal to their Premier League survival hopes. Last month’s wins over Burnley and West Ham changed that, to the point where a win this evening would leave the Magpies 12 points clear of 18th-placed Fulham, who have a maximum of 12 points still to play for.

It is conceivable that Newcastle’s top-flight safety could be mathematically guaranteed by Monday night, when Fulham host Burnley, but Bruce accepts that survival can never be deemed sufficient for the Magpies.

Earlier this week, Brendan Rodgers claimed Bruce had done an “exceptional job” on Tyneside. Precious few Newcastle fans would agree, and mindful of the prevailing mood in which he was operating, even Bruce himself was forced to play down his opposite number’s kind words.

“Look, I’ll never say it’s been an outstanding success, that’s for sure,” he said. “We’ve been, unfortunately, in the bottom half of the Premier League for too long, so it’s always about can we progress? Can we get better?”

After he was ineligible for the Arsenal game, Joe Willock is expected to return to the starting line-up tonight, with Miguel Almiron the likeliest player to make way.

Newcastle (probable, 3-4-2-1): Dubravka; Fernandez, Clark, Dummett; Murphy, Shelvey, S Longstaff, Ritchie; Willock, Saint-Maximin; Wilson.