Newcastle sleepwalk into crisis after disastrous summer transfer timing comes back to haunt them
Timing is crucial in sports, comedy, and life in general. Additionally, Newcastle’s timing is atrocious this season. It began in the summer with a mess that wasn’t really their fault, but it was still a mess.
The timing of Alexander Isak Saga’s late-summer outburst was awful. Your man Macbeth was correct when he said, “If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.” However, there is never an appropriate moment for such antics.
There’s no denying that once the outcome of the Isak caper was obviously not going to go Newcastle’s way, it would have been far less painful had it all played out earlier in the summer.
However, Shakespeare scholars are still divided on whether the foolish Scottish over-thinker had long transfer sagas specifically in mind there. Had Newcastle had enough time to develop a suitable strategy.
We’ve all laughed at how bitter Bayern Munich is over Newcastle spending such outrageous sums of money for Nick Woltemade because they think they have a divine right to acquire all talented German players if they so choose.
They did, however, have a small point. It was an outrageous sum of money spent in an outrageous way.
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Although he doesn’t truly fit Newcastle’s striker profile, his acquisition was made out of sheer desperation.
A transfer that was as much about football as it was about optics. Even though what they did wasn’t a particularly smart move, Newcastle had to appear as though they were doing action to close the massive gap in their strategy.
Despite all of this and Newcastle’s broader difficulties, Woltemade has fared at least as well as and in a number of situations—most notably Isak’s—much better than any of the other expensive final-piece-of-the-puzzle strikers signed over the summer.
This is to his great credit and is generally quite humorous. However, Newcastle’s poor summertime timing has surfaced once more.
Up until the last several weeks, we would have chosen the word “nondescript” to describe Newcastle’s Premier League season. Not especially noteworthy in any direction, neither excellent nor terrible.
They were kind of humming along in that huge pack of teams in mid-table and had not had the same outcome in consecutive games.
Their Carabao defence and the Champions League were where the most striking things were happening. However, Newcastle has now discovered some consistency in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.
They have now achieved successive identical scorelines in the same sad manner, even in the same city, after failing to reach the same outcome in consecutive Premier League games until the weekend.
At West Ham and Brentford, early 1-0 leads have resulted in back-to-back 3-1 losses. That’s terrible enough, but doing that just before the international break in November, when there is absolutely nothing going on and two weeks of idle time must be filled with any old crap? Absolutely terrible timing.
In an attempt to sneak it in without drawing attention, Newcastle has moved to crisis-adjacent status at the worst time of the season.
They have emerged from the bottom of the Premier League’s mediocrity peloton, where third and thirteenth place are separated by just five points.
There is currently a three-point difference between Newcastle and Everton at the rear of that main pack, which is greater than any other difference between any place in the division outside of the summit and bottom.
Eddie Howe is now ready to take over Sack Race’s favouritism after Daniel Farke is removed from the pain of Leeds supporters, and Newcastle is now closer to the relegation zone than they are to even the back of a mid-table group that includes more than half the league.
Because Newcastle is currently being negatively impacted by even the timing of other teams’ difficult times.
