Eddie Howe’s 200th match as Newcastle United’s head coach proved to be a miserable kind of milestone and a microcosm of this maddening season.
A transformative head coach now leads a transitional team, one which has never been able to shake off toil after a disrupted summer, leaving them grasping for form, confidence and momentum; sometimes good but never quite good enough to put a convincing run together.
Newcastle were better than Manchester United but they were also beaten and, ultimately, it is the final bit that matters. They have now lost five away matches in the Premier League, scoring a meagre seven goals, four of them in a single match against Everton. They had 16 shots at Old Trafford, they had more possession and dominated the second half which made it an outlier, yet the pang of disappointment was desperately familiar.
Newcastle are 11th in the table and highly adept in the methodology of not winning.
“The quality of player is there, you can see that,” Howe said afterwards, “but we’re finding a way to concede goals when we don’t look like we should and we’re not scoring the goals that we should at the other end. So it’s a sort of deadly mix for us.” Manchester United were there for the taking, but the opportunity was spurned.
Anthony Gordon contemplates another away defeat (Robbie Jay Barratt – AMA/Getty Images)
It is Howe’s soaring standards that have made this kind of mediocrity feel so unacceptable, which is an unfortunate irony. Uplift is forever out of reach and existence has become grumpy.
“I thought this was another step forward in terms of performance, but no one really wants to hear that,” Howe said. “No one really wants to analyse that too deeply because the result is the most important thing. We’re well aware of the world that we live in.”
Howe’s double century arrived at an inflection point for Newcastle with noises off growing louder.
If 2025 has brought extraordinary release, there is also struggle as the club wrestled with what it means to be successful. Winning something scratched a lifetime’s itch, but it did not bring an end to discomfort; they were slapped down in the transfer market, Alexander Isak agitated and then left, and what felt like a springboard creaked and snapped. It has never been repaired.
With more churn in the boardroom, Howe was obliged to reset his team’s foundations on the hoof and, in that context, it is no wonder their football is sometimes so unfinished. On and off the field, their identity has mutated; a club known for institutional underachievement claimed a first domestic trophy for 70 years, while a collective of ferocious underdogs understood how it felt to be top dogs and, as a result, lost a little of their bite.
The autumn arrival of David Hopkinson as chief executive and Ross Wilson as sporting director has meant a jolt of positive energy, filling positions which should never have been left unfilled. Yet Howe made a perfectly fair point in his pre-match press conference when he referenced “limbo”, in terms of a new stadium and training ground — big picture issues which have prompted much talk and precious little walk.
The club Newcastle want to be could not be clearer; how they get there now feels much more opaque. Even allowing for the team’s reshaping and the relatively new phenomenon of three games a week, there has been chuntering about Howe and his players from some supporters, who are suddenly accustomed to more. In this regard, the marked disparity between home and away performances has not helped.
Eddie Howe and his Newcastle players applaud the travelling support at the end (Serena Taylor/Newcastle United via Getty Images)
In many ways, this game did not deviate too much from the script.
Patrick Dorgu’s 24th-minute volley was special, but it also represented a festive showcase of Newcastle’s failings, from their inability to deal with an opposition set-piece — this time a long throw — to Aaron Ramsdale’s unconvincing attempt to protect his near post and just that wider sense of softness. It put them in a losing position which, this season, means game over.
The dismay here was specific rather than general. After an early “tactical” injury to Ramsdale, which allowed Howe to pass on instructions via the excellent Lewis Hall, Newcastle’s attitude and tempo was far removed from their supine behaviour at Sunderland, their last away fixture. They pressed and harried a weakened Manchester United XI. Bruno Guimaraes had a shot cleared off the line. Anthony Gordon was a firebrand of the left.
With Dorgu’s goal, focus blurred and impetus waned as Newcastle competed with their own fragile belief, but they weathered the remainder of a bitty first half and renewal accompanied the start of the second. Manchester United were ahead but not cruising, they were winning but not unassailable or dominant, and now they sat off.
While Benjamin Sesko clipped a shot against the left post and Diogo Dalot shot over when he should have scored, these chances were exceptions. Newcastle found a form of control and kept it, as Ruben Amorim tinkered and tweaked beyond comprehension and his players tracked backwards. Hall smacked the ball off the crossbar, Gordon drove it across goal, Joelinton found Senne Lammens’ arms and Miley found the sky.
Newcastle’s failure did not feel systematic, engrained or inevitable. It did not feel like a failure of away form per se, rather than a failure of execution; their 43 touches in the opposition box and 46 crosses were the most they have recorded in any league match this season, yet there were only three shots on target and Lammens was hardly peppered.
Yet it cannot be denied that this was, indeed, another failure and there have been a plethora of them.
“You could make an argument that we should have got something from today, but haven’t, and we’ve had that feeling too many times on the road this year,” Howe said. “We’re a team and the team hasn’t functioned well enough.”