Newcastle United are through to the FA Cup quarter final after their win over West Bromwich Albion on Tuesday night.
Given what the club’s attitude has been towards domestic cups over recent years, that must be a real novelty. For as long as Mike Ashley has owned Newcastle, a succession of managers have seemingly tried to exit domestic tournaments as quickly as possible. The logic being that the first team squad is so narrow and the club’s focus is so trained on retaining the Premier League broadcasting revenue, that aiming for anything else has been turned into a frivolous pursuit.
The cut and thrust (the fun) of cup competitions are a nuisance. An obstacle, even, on the road to gilded stasis.
Newcastle are hardly alone in having that attitude, but it's a mentality which is hard to tolerate in football. It’s contradictory. The whole point of sport is competition, so watching it reduced to a form of risk analysis is enough to push any supporter towards existential crisis.
Newcastle fans can speak for themselves; it’s not anyone else’s place to describe their relationship with their team. But it's discouraging to witness the wilful ignorance towards their dilemma - this faux-incredulity at their complaints about Steve Bruce. As if, after years of watching ambition being retracted – and it has been for nearly a decade and a half now – an appearance in a cup quarter-final is supposed to be some sort of recompense.
Perhaps that’s overstating things, but there does seem to be a growing habit of belittling these supporters. How often, for instance, have they been criticised this season for responding negatively to Bruce? Either to his initial appointment or the performances he has authored since.
His football has often been dull, antiquated and unsuccessful, and pretending otherwise would just be disingenuous. Yes, Newcastle are unlikely to be relegated this season and, in a few weeks, they will probably have the privilege of being knocked out of the FA Cup by Manchester City, but it’s a strange world indeed when such meagre accomplishments represent ultimate validation.
“What do you think of Steve Bruce's Newcastle now then!”
Well, the same.
That they're a football team without a proper identity. That they exist in games without ever defining them. And that in spite of the odd encouraging result, they've made no ideological progress over the last six months.
The most pertinent conclusion remains a damning one: Newcastle are the only club in the Premier League that would ever have given Bruce another job at this level of the game. Not entirely coincidentally, they're also the only club in the Premier League that - quite literally - cannot give season tickets away.
That’s not necessarily an indictment of his abilities, more just a recognition that he isn’t a coach capable of taking a club on a journey worth buying into. He is an eighteen-month appointment. A do-the-best-you-can man. He is someone who can pick up the baton, carry it for a few hundred yards, but who will invariably trip over his own feet a short way down the track. Eventually the results will turn and his situation will become irretrievable and when that happens - when he clears out his desk and boxes up his lever-arch files - it'll be as if he was never there at all. .
He’s not going to change Newcastle’s realities as a club. He isn’t going to transform any of their players or encourage any sort of evolution.
So, what’s the point?
That’s not meant to be dismissive. It’s just that the trend in modern management is for precisely the type of head coach that Steve Bruce has never been. It’s a world of thinkers and doers, pragmatists and philosophers. The fans understand that; this is what instructed their original despondency. They knew that the occasional one-goal win over a top-six side would really just be a nice day out and that, a week or two later, their team would be back to where it was before, with all the same weaknesses and fragilities.
They knew that they wouldn't go anywhere under Bruce and, to date, they're being proven absolutely right.
A statistic which illustrates that: since beating Chelsea on the 21st January, Newcastle have not won a Premier League game. Since the 2-2 draw with Everton three days later, they haven’t even scored a Premier League goal.
The sequence itself isn’t the problem. The issue is the lack of growth. While one bad performances bleeds into another, the good performances - like the wins over Manchester United, Tottenham and that last-minute victory over Chelsea - never seem to instruct anything at all. They don't take anything from those games. Newcastle never get any stronger or better as a result and it's been that way - with the Rafael Benitez interlude excepted - for as long as anyone can remember.
It’s the same players playing in the same way every single week. The only real variable is the performance of the opposition.
Worst of all, there seems to be an acceptance from on high that that is the sort of football club Newcastle are happy to be. That they're content to be a victim. And happy for their supporters to be told that anything other than failure every year is cause for celebration.
A quarter-final is a nice moment and Wembley is finally in reach again. That's excellent; the fans deserve that. Here's hoping that they can somehow upend Manchester City. But it's very telling that 14th place and a win over a Championship team is what has become a "told you so" moment at Newcastle.
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