The ACN Match Review – Newcastle United (a)

Biggest positive

The biggest positive here is that we weren’t cheering on a team owned by human rights abusing despots. Football isn’t a matter of life or death, but for some criticism of the man who ultimately owns Newcastle United is. I want Norwich to win games, win trophies, win the league. But not so much that I’d be okay for all that winning to be bankrolled by a murdering dictator. But Mike Ashley was a wrong ‘un, in fairness.

Anyway, the next biggest positive was that we didn’t lose and that we got to see a Pukki yläkulma goal (which I am reliably informed is close-ish to ‘top bins’.) We move on.

Biggest problem

We didn’t play that well, against the team so bottom of the league that they (still) haven’t won a game all season. We were sluggish in the period after the red card and never really picked up the pace. Slow, ponderous and too risk-averse. There were large patches of the game where you could easily forget we were up against ten men.

Alarmingly, Smith’s tactical tinkering at halftime and during the second half didn’t really change the fundamentals.

Is it worth also having a bit of a worry about squad depth? Cantwell is still kicking his heels, Rashica had a groin twinge, and Normann is laid up – and it all showed. If one of those three started, we’d have had a better chance of taking all three points. Rashica was superb at the weekend and would have been the livener we needed. Cantwell was just right for the patches where Newcastle sat back. The alternatives were a big step down.

Funniest moment of the game?

The penalty decisions were so funny only because if you didn’t laugh you’d cry with rage. Two almost identical incidents in which the ball struck the hand in the penalty area, when the arm of the defending player was in an unusual position (or whatever the technical term is), one given and one not. Newcastle might be bottom of the league, but they were still The Big Club™ in this encounter. VAR checks don’t help when only one of the incidents gets a full on VAR check.

The whole farce was made into a parody by the commentary, which had all the one-sidedness of BBC Radio Newcastle without any of the local knowledge. Shearer was comical in his ravings about their penalty without ever giving our shout a cursory chinwag.

Did an along come Norwich happen? 

We’ve never won a Premier League game on a Tuesday. Newcastle haven’t won all season. Dean Smith has never lost to the Magpies. The xACN spat out by Nick Hayhoe’s supercomputer was a whopper, a record breaker, an absolute earthquake. When I’d picked myself up from the shock of it, I did say to myself that the most along come Norwich outcome was therefore surely now a draw.

What was the atmosphere like? 

There’s something iconic about St James’ Park, even for away fans. The stature, the atmosphere, the view from the eleventeeth tier. That’s easy for me to say because I wasn’t there. Childcare and work kept me away from the million mile round trip (and that’s just the walk up to the away end, lol).

It’s hard to tell exactly who is singing when you’re watching on TV. Luckily, on the ball city stands out, and the “we’re Norwich city, we’ll sing on our own” was unmissable. Those who made the trip earned the right to a better performance than they got but it sounded like they enjoyed themselves nonetheless. And at least they didn’t have to listen to Alan Shearer the whole way through the game.

Summary

Newcastle needed to win that game more than we did, and we’d have taken a draw before kick off. There are positives here: two defeats in our last eight games, eight points from the last twelve on offer. This is a team that was in freefall, and has now well and truly stablised.

But the Norwich fans didn’t start their long journey south feeling overly buoyant because Newcastle were there for the taking, we didn’t demonstrate the nous, the skills or the drive to take them. We can hardly claim to feel hard done by, when we were made to look laboured and unimaginative for long spells by the team bottom of the league playing with ten men.

We aren’t dropping like a stone back to the championship anymore, but tonight’s performance suggests that Dean Smith isn’t, on his own, the solution we need, and that this is a team that needs to work harder, and smarter, to get to a point where three teams will be deservedly below us in the league.