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Opinion

Some deluded Newcastle fans need to look at what happened in next 6 fixtures last season

6 years ago
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Obviously it isn’t everybody but I am seeing an increasing minority of Newcastle fans who have admirable levels of optimism.

Others would maybe describe it as delusion.

Nobody can dispute that Rafa and his players had a tough start to the season.

Bad enough Mike Ashley taking liberties, yet again, but when the fixtures were announced in June it just felt somebody was having a laugh with them.

In the first five games, to get four of last season’s top six, was pretty cruel.

The match at Cardiff could have gone either way but fears have been realised with the other four, 2-1 defeats to Man City, Spurs, Arsenal and Chelsea.

Some reasons for optimism in each of those defeats but nowhere near enough to suggest Newcastle deserved to win any of them, possibly maybe deserving of a point or two, but no more than that.

One point from the opening five games is a really poor foundation to build from and yet I am seeing these Newcastle fans who are believing that automatically things will improve, now that NUFC are playing the ‘lesser’ sides.

Yes, no reason why Newcastle can’t attack these matches but to think that there are any easy/guaranteed points, is naivety in the extreme.

Here are the next six matches and the scores in these fixtures from last season, in brackets is the date we play them in the next two months:

Crystal Palace 1 Newcastle 1 (Sat 22 Sept)

Newcastle 2 Leicester 3 (Sat 29 Sept)

Man Utd 4 Newcastle 1 (Sat 6 Oct)

Newcastle 0 Brighton 0 (Sat 20 Oct)

Southampton 2 Newcastle 2 (Sat 27 Oct)

Newcastle 0 Watford 3 (Sat 3 Nov)

It makes pretty grim reading, three points from eighteen last season in these six matches.

If repeated, that would give us four points from the first 11 games and into the second week of November. Doesn’t bear thinking about.

I honestly though before this weekend that we had more chance of getting something off Arsenal than we do at Palace I reckon home to Leicester is about on the same level as Arsenal in terms of chances of getting anything.

Any complacency as to just how dire the situation is at Newcastle, must be quickly brushed away.

I honestly think staying up this season will be almost as big a challenge as getting Mike Ashley to sell up.

Of the other 19 clubs, only Cardiff have a worse team/squad than Newcastle, yet very worryingly, NUFC were no better than them.

Huddersfield are pretty much on a similar level to Newcastle in terms of quality of squad etc but after that…?

Everybody else improved and invested in the summer, Newcastle made a £20m+ profit and at best the team/squad stood still, or as I see it, went backwards.

Looking at those next six fixtures I get the horrible feeling that so many Newcastle fans will be thinking nine points minimum, I see it as six points would be a massive positive.

It isn’t impossible that Newcastle could pick up three victories but with so few decent creative players and goalscorers in the Newcastle team/squad, I see it as far more likely we could see 0-0 and 1-1 hard fought draws, maybe an odd goal win.

Every point will have to be fought for and when you see the atmosphere as bad as it was against Arsenal and in other matches, plus yet another home game not sold out, I worry that a demoralised Newcastle could be facing Watford in front of forty five thousand or so, desperately needing a win to give us something to cling onto.

This is what happens when a squad is repeatedly not properly invested in.

It says it all when we see our possible salvation largely reliant on two loan players, Rondon and Kenedy, who Newcastle/Ashley have no intention of signing permanently.

As every other club tries to progress, Mike Ashley simply has Newcastle digging itself an ever bigger hole that is increasingly tougher to climb out of.
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