Newcastle’s civil war has been assessed by club veteran Alan Shearer following Eddie Howe’s team’s 3-1 loss to Fulham on Saturday.
After falling behind in the first half to goals from Emile Smith Rowe and Raul Jimenez, the Magpies conceded their first goal of the season. Just after halftime, Harvey Barnes cut the deficit in half, giving them hope for a comeback, but Reiss Nelson sealed Fulham’s well-earned victory in stoppage time.
The defeat occurs amidst internal strife at St. James’ Park following Paul Mitchell, the sporting director, publicly critiquing the team’s transfer approach, and Howe defending Newcastle’s hiring practices in the subsequent windows.
Shearer thinks that the conflict between Mitchell and Howe is causing problems on the field, and that Saturday’s loss was long overdue.
Shearer stated on the podcast The Rest is Football that “what’s going on off the pitch [is an issue].” “We’ve discussed Eddie and the sporting director previously.”
“Performances on the field will suffer if that isn’t resolved in some way—it always does.” Everything that occurs off the field, whether it be in the boardroom or elsewhere, finally comes to an end, and that requires resolution.
Shearer continued, “They were rotten for the first half, they were dreadful,” in response to the defeat at the hands of Fulham. It was a bit of a reality check, even though I knew they had the results—three victories and a draw—before [Saturday’s] game.
They actually hadn’t performed well the entire season. We were praising their team spirit as they prevailed in contests. That must be encouraging since things will fall into place when they start playing well.
They were extremely impoverished and didn’t deserve anything [against Fulham]. Although there was some improvement in the second half after they altered things up, Fulham was still far superior and should have defeated Newcastle.
Newcastle has taken 10 points from their first five games, placing them in sixth place even if they haven’t been able to reach their best form.
However, given that Howe’s team has five league games left, including matches against Manchester City, Chelsea, and Arsenal, it appears that staying in the European spots will be a challenging assignment over the next several weeks.
The Carabao Cup match between Newcastle and AFC Wimbledon was supposed to resume today, however the match was postponed because of significant flooding at the League Two team’s stadium.
The game will now take place on Tuesday at St. James’ Park instead of the original date, which gives Newcastle one week to get ready for their Saturday matchup with Pep Guardiola’s City.
