IT might have ended with a series of stumbles, but for Newcastle United, 2023 was a year of magical moments and incredible memories. From St James’ Park to the San Siro, Wembley Way to the Westfalenstadion in Dortmund, Newcastle’s supporters trekked across Europe to follow their team. In the main, their loyalty was royally rewarded.
Cup finals, the Champions League, a first top-four finish for two decades – and all without their Saudi Arabian owners embarking on the kind of spending spree that had been predicted when they completed their takeover just over two years ago. Yes, money has been spent. But Newcastle’s successes over the last 12 months were largely a result of the astute management of Eddie Howe, the remarkable improvement of a number of players who were at St James’ long before Mike Ashley exited the building and the strength of the spirit that has been engendered amongst the Magpies’ first-team group. There have been obstacles along the way, most notably in the first four months of the current campaign, but as 2024 beckons, Newcastle’s journey remains pretty much on track.
As 2023 dawned, the Magpies were sitting pretty in third position in the table, a spot they maintained when their opening game of the year resulted in a goalless draw at Arsenal that infuriated Mikel Arteta. Newcastle were accused of gamesmanship and negativity – with Jurgen Klopp having made similar accusations, it was proof that Howe’s side had the established big guns in the Premier League rattled.
By the end of February, Newcastle had fallen out of the top four, but the opening two months of the year were not about maintaining league position, they were dominated by the Carabao Cup.
The two-legged semi-final win over Southampton was a definite highlight, with the atmosphere at St James’ for the decisive second leg as good as anything that was generated over the course of the rest of the year. Sean Longstaff was the hometown hero, firing home the two goals that secured a 3-1 aggregate win and took Newcastle to Wembley.
It was the Magpies’ first major final for more than two decades, and their fans certainly made the most of their weekend in the capital. Trafalgar Square became a black-and-white party zone on the eve of the game, with Wembley Way also becoming a Geordie enclave in the hours before kick-off. By the final whistle, however, delirium had given way to deflation.
The seeds of Newcastle’s final defeat to Manchester United were sown a week before the game when Nick Pope’s red card against Liverpool ruled him out of Wembley. Martin Dubravka was cup-tied, having already played for Manchester United in the early rounds of the competition, so Howe had to turn to his third-choice goalkeeper, Loris Karius. While the German did not really do anything wrong at Wembley, the disruption appeared to affect Newcastle, whose form was beginning to flag away. Disappointingly, the final followed a similar pattern to the Magpies’ Wembley appearances in the 1990s, when they also failed to lay a glove on the opposition.
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Understandably disappointed by their no-show, how would Newcastle react in their remaining league games? To the immense credit of Howe and his players, the answer was impressively. After losing to Manchester City at the start of March, the Magpies won seven of their next eight matches to lift themselves back into the Champions League places. The highlight of the run was a remarkable thrashing of Spurs that saw Newcastle race into a 5-0 lead after just 21 minutes, such was the clinical quality of their attacking play.
A 4-1 demolition of Brighton took the Magpies to the brink of a top-four finish, and their place in the Champions League was secured when they played out a goalless draw with Leicester in their final home game. Not for the first time that season, the party on Tyneside continued long into the night.
How would Newcastle build on their success? In the transfer window, presumably. But while the Magpies spent around £130m in the summer, the evidence so far this season suggests it was the first window when they got things wrong. At least some of what has happened in the first half of the current campaign can be attributed to the missteps of the summer.
While Longstaff, Bruno Guimaraes and Joelinton all performed excellently last season, the lack of a natural holding midfielder was a negative factor on a number of occasions last term. Yet instead of addressing the problem, Newcastle’s recruitment team broke the club’s transfer record to sign Sandro Tonali, a midfield playmaker, from AC Milan. Tonali’s subsequent ten-month ban for breaching betting regulations could not have been foreseen, but even when he was playing, the Italian did not look like the type of player Newcastle needed.
The same could be said of Harvey Barnes, who suffered a foot injury just seven games into his career on Tyneside, but who was already looking fairly similar to the wide-attacking options already on the Magpies’ books. Goodness knows what is going on with Lewis Hall, but Howe clearly does not think the Chelsea full-back, who Newcastle are effectively committed to sign on a permanent basis, is ready for first-team football. Tino Livramento is currently the only success story from the summer arrivals, but even he has been used sparingly in the last three months.
Newcastle’s squad was not really strengthened in the summer, and that became a huge problem once the demands of competing on three different fronts in the first half of the season took their toll. The scale of the injury crisis that left Howe without 12 senior players for much of November and December was pretty much impossible to predict, but perhaps the impact of so many absentees could have been mitigated if the summer budget had been spent more wisely. Instead, Newcastle struggled to cope with what was thrown at them.
The shaky start to the Premier League season could be attributed to the difficulty of the fixture list, and by the time they thrashed Crystal Palace in mid-October, the Magpies were back in the top six. September’s stunning eight-goal thrashing of Sheffield United showed what they were capable of, coming a fortnight before the game that is the undoubted highlight of the season so far.
Newcastle’s Champions League campaign began with a goalless draw in Milan that was notable for both the impressive rearguard action that secured a point and the pre-match scenes that saw half of Tyneside decamp to Italy. It was matchday two that really proved the Magpies had returned to European football’s top table in style, though, with Paris St Germain being put to the sword as Newcastle ran out 4-1 winners in their first home game.
Had they followed the win up against Borussia Dortmund a fortnight later, they would have been on the brink of qualifying for the knockout stages with three games to spare. Instead, back-to-back defeats to Dortmund left Newcastle in trouble, with their position worsening when a horrendous refereeing decision handed Paris St Germain a stoppage-time equaliser in the Parc des Princes. A win over AC Milan in the final group game would have kept their hopes alive, but despite taking the lead through Joelinton, they eventually fell to a 2-1 defeat. To compound their disappointment, a bottom-place finish meant they did not even have the cushion of a place in the Europa League.
The Milan defeat came at the peak of their injury misery, which also took a toll on their domestic form. The absence of Pope and Sven Botman undermined Newcastle’s defensive security, missing Joe Willock, Elliot Anderson and Joelinton meant Guimaraes had to be played into the ground, repeatedly being without Barnes and Jacob Murphy resulted in Anthony Gordon and Miguel Almiron running on empty. The Boxing Day home defeat to Nottingham Forest was a bitterly disappointing way to sign off for the year, but it had been coming.
The challenge now is to regroup and climb back up the table to secure European football again next season. The January transfer window should be interesting, with the ownership group seemingly willing to invest despite the ongoing restrictions imposed by FFP. Howe’s position is not under threat, but he readily admits the backward slide of the last couple of months has to be halted.
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