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Opinion

Newcastle United trying to fix the wrong problems

2 years ago
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If you prefer you Newcastle United articles a little more to the point, then skip down to the paragraph beginning with “AS I GET OLDER”.

Otherwise – here’s a small intro to the subject in hand.

When I worked in Abu Dhabi many years ago, a group of us would often come off a nightshift and head to the local Hilton Hotel for a fry up breakfast. For 25 Dirhams (4 quid at the time) you could hit the buffet and get fried eggs, sausages, bacon, mushrooms, baked beans, toast and coffee. The sausage and bacon were the real porky stuff, not the more faith-friendly beefy versions served elsewhere, and because it was a buffet, you could just keep going back for more. And more. And more. And we did.

After a few months the price went up 30 dirhams.

Sadly – as always seems to happen when you get a decent crew on shift together – the powers that be did a reshuffle and split up the shift, with us all ending up on less social shifts where our colleagues were, how can I put this tactfully, less appreciative of the porcine origins of some of the breakfast ingredients. As a result, the breakfast club disbanded.

A few months later there was another shuffle, the stars aligned, the breakfast club reformed, and after our first nightshift reunited, we headed back to the Hilton for a veritable porkfest.

Only to find that in less than eight months, breakfast had now gone up from four to eleven quid.

We decided that as we were there we would partake but that this was the last time.

As the duty manager did his rounds doing the usual sycophantic “is everything alright, sir?” we decided to find out what had happened with the prices.

“Mahmoud, last time we were here it was 30 dirhams for breakfast, all you can eat, now it’s 65 and restricted to one trip to the buffet. What’s going on?”

His response gave us probably our first real insight into the fact that people educated in different countries, under different education systems, may actually approach things differently.

He replied, “It used to be 25 dirhams and we were very busy every day. Then we put it up to 30 dirhams and business dropped off to almost nothing. So to recover our profits with fewer customers we had to put the price up to 65 dirhams.”

“So it never occurred to you to put the price back down to 25?”

“No. That makes no sense. It is less!”

We were the only customers in the restaurant.

AS I GET OLDER, something that seems to wind me up a lot more than it did, is our obsession with focusing on the wrong problem.

We launch a global war on plastics when the actual problem isn’t so much the materials, as the people who use them. In the same way that we educate drivers so they don’t crash, we should be educating (and punishing where necessary) the idiots who are not properly disposing of those plastics.

We’re fixing the wrong problem!

We provide poorer education in schools and then try to fix it by lowering the passing grades because we are not meeting “quotas”.

Again, fixing the wrong problem!

We have congestion charges in cities and tolls on motorways with the government trying to stop us using cars, when the root cause of the problem is their lack of planning for future requirements.

Again, fixing the wrong problem!

And as I’m sure you have already guessed, this mélange finally brings me round to VAR.

Having just read a ridiculous article claiming that VAR could have already cost us 4.4 million pounds, I felt the need to try to push our attention in a different direction.

Yes, there was a tug on Longstaff’s shirt against Wolves that should have been a penalty, and the whole Willock-into-the-keeper” thing was just plain silly.

Personally, having replayed it a dozen times I would have to say that I thought Isak WAS offside against Liverpool, but I’m sure there are fans out there who will disagree, if for no other reason than they feel the obligation to disagree with anything that is not 100% pro-Toon. We can’t say for sure that if Isak’s goal had been allowed we would have won the match or even drawn it. It’s an old cliché but the likes of Liverpool and Man City generally just try as hard as they need to get the result, and in most cases they do have “another gear” that they can change up into if they have to.

In the last few seasons we’ve been exposed at the back way too many times, conceding goals as teams increased the pressure in the last 10 or 15 minutes to get the equaliser or the winner. They increase the pressure because they have to and because they could.

As an aside here, I have to ask, do the bigger teams fight harder to get the goal that gives them the draw, or the goal that gives them the win?

Scoring first and early against some teams often elicits a response that, last season at least, we simply couldn’t cope with. It has been likened to the scene in Blazing Saddles where Mongo goes into town causing mayhem and Sheriff Bart reaches for his gun, only for the Waco Kid to tell him, “Don’t do that. If you shoot him, you’ll just make him mad!”

I’d like to say we’ve fixed that problem at the back, but the Man City and Liverpool results might suggest that while we may have bought all the right tools, we still need to learn how to use them properly.

Back to the “wrong” problem”.

As fans we are happy blaming everybody else for our problems and ignore an issue that lies a little closer to home.

During the Palace match we had 23 attempts at goal, with only six of them on target, and what we are obsessing about is something that was neither a shot, nor on target.

Yes the goal should have stood, and yes, whether through incompetence or intention, the limited information presented to the referee “pitchside”, by the VAR operator, persuaded him that the goal should be disallowed, but maybe, rather than focusing on that one event, we should be a little more concerned that we lacked that clinical finishing touch?

Palace was definitely a game decided by defenders and keepers, but yet again, we were very disappointing in front of goal.

I refuse to lay into Isak for missing his chance. He’s a youngster and walks onto the hallowed turf for his first home game in front of a crowd of 30,000 more than he is used to. The fans are roaring, the noise is deafening, and there’s even a 12 foot high flag with his face on it. This kind of expectation is either going to lift you up or terrify you. Either way, it’s going to take a bit of getting used to.

Oh, one piece of advice for our players. If the ball is lobbed over their defence, and you find yourself with only the keeper to beat, and your name is Miggy, check to see who is standing behind you before you shoot!

There have been an awful lot of bad decisions and even worse finishing over the last few games.

There are two ways to win a game. You either try to score more goals than the opposition, or you try to concede fewer than them.

“Isn’t that the same thing?”, you may well ask.

“Definitely not!” I may well reply.

Keegan’s Entertainers were of the “score more than them” school of thought, while Wolves last season, for example, leaned more towards the “concede fewer” philosophy.

In our first 19 games of last season we conceded an average of 2.2 goals per match, while in the second half of the season, with the addition of Trippier, Burn and Target, that came down to 1 per match.

And while we had a positive trend at the other end of the pitch, going from 1 to 1.3 scored per match, I think it’s fair to state that, in an effort to keep us up, and just a single transfer window to do it in, Eddie Howe was looking more towards emulating Wolves than the Entertainers.

While it’s still way too early to draw conclusions, coincidentally our numbers so far this season are very similar to the second half of last. Goals against are the same at 1 per match, with goals for being slightly down at 1.2. And this includes games against Man City and Liverpool.

Of course we hope / expect things to improve as our crocked stars return to fitness and Howe nails down the best combination of players to field for each occasion, but the numbers tell us that just trying to concede fewer than the opposition alone, just doesn’t get the job done.

While sorting out the odd dodgy VAR decision would be nice, I can’t help thinking that scoring more goals might be a better way to go to get those results.

Unlike some, I think it’s crazy to suggest that West Ham is a “must win” match, but at some point we have to produce something in front of goal that has the rest of the Prem thinking of us as more of a threat, than just a difficult game. And it has to be more than Maxi having one of his rare displays like he did against City.

Hopefully, with players back fit and Isak more drilled in the Magpies way, Sunday will be the chance for us to show that we are equally as capable in front of their goal as we are ours.

Note; Having read complaints online about the poor quality of the replica kit being put out by Castore, I came to the conclusion that maybe we struggled at Molineux because we didn’t expect to be playing Wolves in cheap clothing.

Sorry – couldn’t resist it!

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