Caulkin:
This is not how it should be. To be wholly frank, this is wholly wrong, a denial of history, a crime against nature. Newcastle United are a lot of things — bonkers, bat-shit, befuddling — but they are not this club, this safe and stodgy in the Premier League’s midriff club, this muddling along quite nicely club. The table, where Steve Bruce’s side sit ninth, says one thing and every fibre of your being says another. Mostly, it just says WTF?
Newcastle do calamity and they do that very well. Newcastle do great big spurts of ebullience and they don’t do those enough. What they do not do is pootle in the middle, with little sense of impending doom, of menace or apprehension. No, no, no; this is just not normal and it will not do. It will not do at all. Bereft of stress at Christmas? Miguel Almiron among the goals? Truly, the stuff of miracle and wonder.
“Miracle” was the word Rafa Benitez deployed exactly a year ago, when Newcastle drew 0-0 with Fulham. The result left them 15th, but three of their next four league games were against Liverpool, Manchester United and Chelsea. They had not won a match until November, the transfer window was approaching, the club had not been sold and tension was palpable. “If we can be better than three teams, it will be another miracle,” Benitez said.
Twelve months before that, Newcastle moved out of the bottom three courtesy of a 3-2 victory at West Ham, bringing a run of nine winless games to a close. They were in the thick of battle and Benitez admitted “we know it will be difficult to the end”. As it transpired, a fine second half to the season proved otherwise and they finished 10th, but that sense of toil and trauma clung to them.
The year before that, they were beating Burton Albion 2-1 and top of the Championship. The year before that, Steve McClaren’s side were one place above the Premier League relegation zone. The year before that, Newcastle may have been ninth, but they lost their fourth match in succession to Sunderland, their Tyne-Wear rivals, always a destabilising result. Alan Pardew, the manager, left a week later and the team only secured survival on the final day.
This is who Newcastle are. Talk to Steve Harper about existence at St James’ Park and the club’s longest-serving player, now a first-team coach under Bruce, will find extraterrestrial context. “If a Martian landed and I had to explain what this club was all about, I’d say ‘jump on the rollercoaster and enjoy the ride’,” he says. “There doesn’t seem to be any middle ground — you’re either at the top of the slope or at the bottom of the dip.”
Bruce, a boyhood supporter of the club, knows it, too. Emotionally, Newcastle can be an unhinged kind of place and he has already felt some of it, pilloried on his arrival at Benitez’s successor, but now presiding over security. After beating Crystal Palace 1-0, they have 25 points, 10 clear of the bottom three, which as nufc.com, the unofficial fans’ website, puts it: “Is an achievement worthy of note.”
“I think it’s part of the beauty of Newcastle,” Bruce tells The Athletic. “It always seems to have been like that, even in my day, supporting the team as a kid. There always seems to be a crisis or the club’s doing great and then it’s rock bottom. That’s what it’s like, that’s the unique thing about it; it’s unique because it’s so challenging. There’s so much emphasis on everybody and everything.
“I saw an interview with Graeme Souness when I first got the job and he’s someone who has managed Liverpool, he’s managed in Glasgow and he’s managed in Turkey — those are three big, passionate places — and he said that this was the most difficult one he’s ever had. I’ve got huge respect for Graeme and that makes you sit back and think. I can understand it now, I really can. But we’re doing OK.”
Perma-crisis is not fertile ground for progress and the dissatisfaction of last summer, the sense of disquiet, the falling crowds, felt like a club edging to the precipice, but Newcastle have brought it around. Comfortable and Newcastle are not obvious partners. Bruce laughs at that. “That’s my job, to try and keep it comfortable and try to bring the club together and unite the supporters,” he says. “That’s what any healthy club does. It’s my job to steer a pathway through it.”
The moment when Almiron scored for the first time in 11 months was loud and joyous — “the crowd took the roof off for him,” Bruce says — and it was also the exception. Newcastle are not playing well and Roy Hodgson was left shaking his head at Palace’s failure to win, let alone draw, but they are sweating and grafting and finding a way to do it. “Tough to beat, tough to watch,” according to nufc.com. It is less a trend than a habit.
Whatever they are, Bruce warrants recognition. “We’re absolutely delighted for him,” Andy Carroll tells The Athletic in front of the dug-out, perspiration still pricking his forehead. “The minute he came in, the pressure on him was phenomenal. It felt like everybody was on his back, that nobody wanted him to do well. Coming off the back of having Rafa here, a manager who has been at the top clubs, it was hard for Brucie coming in, but he put his head down and got on with it.
“The lads have all backed him. The players in the dressing-room could easily have turned away and thought, ‘do you know what, we’ll go with the fans or with the media’, but we haven’t. We’ve stuck in and ground it out. Sometimes the football isn’t the greatest to watch, but we’re working really hard in training and we’re getting results. That’s credit to Steve and all the other staff he’s brought in.”
What to make of it though? “I don’t really understand how we’re ninth,” Charlotte Robson, a supporter and podcaster for true faith fanzine, says. “We don’t play that well. I feel much more used to drawing the curtains by 5.30pm on a Saturday afternoon and lying in the dark, worrying about how we’ll stay in the Premier League, but results make it seem like we’re a mid-table team this season.
“The games are still woeful at times. It feels like a very strange season across the board: I know there are fans of other teams who would love to be in our position and I find it very hard to explain not being comfortable with this comfortable position. This just has never really been my experience as an active Newcastle fan. Either we’re absolutely mint, or we’re in a relegation battle. Normally in a relegation battle.”
Does it feel different to Isaac Hayden, who has been on Tyneside since the Championship? “No, not really,” he tells us. “I think the table lies a little bit because there’s so much tight space between the relegation zone and where we are. A couple of bad results and you could be back down there. Yeah, it’s great and yeah, it looks great, but things can change so rapidly in the Premier League. We have to keep chugging away.”
It is what they do best. Against Palace, Bruce switched to a 3-5-2 formation, with Almiron playing behind Carroll and Joelinton, but they remain an incomplete jigsaw. “It’s about the quality of crosses coming into the box and the quality of passes in their half,” Carroll says. “It’ll come.” The words he keeps repeating are grinding, grinded and ground, but he grins when Almiron is mentioned. They all love the Paraguayan because “he works his nuts off for us”.
Newcastle could have lost narrowly to Palace, just as they lost narrowly to Burnley the weekend before. They won 2-0 at Sheffield United and nobody quite knew how, but here they are, ninth and stodgy, ninth and safe, shockingly unsurprising. “You don’t know what to think,” one long-serving stalwart at the training ground says. “It always feels like there’s something round the corner at this club. Things are too quiet!”
The time is ripe for Mike Ashley to pop up with a contentious decision, for Newcastle’s inner Newcastle to emerge. So we pinch ourselves and look up, half-expecting the sky to fall. “I’m not sure what to do with all the energy I normally spend worrying,” Robson, 30, says. “I still feel like something terrible will happen and our bubble will burst, but that’s what being a Newcastle fan has been like for me. Maybe this is what being a fan of a normal team is like. Very unusual.”
