. Just as Eddie Howe’s players seemed to be sliding, incrementally, towards mediocrity, a place in the Carabao Cup’s last eight changed an entire narrative.
Quite apart from creating the tantalising possibility of securing a long craved piece of silverware and, with it, a back door route into Europe, this cup run is helping camouflage the off stage tensions that have contributed to Newcastle’s latterly disappointing Premier League form.
It helped that Chelsea’s radically revamped team suggested that Enzo Maresca was not exactly prioritising this competition. It seemed somehow significant that he left Cole Palmer on the bench throughout while Nicolas Jackson did not even travel to the north east. Perhaps equally tellingly at the final whistle, Palmer, who had repeatedly warmed up, appeared to be asking Maresca’s coaching staff why he had not been sent on to attempt to eclipse Alexander Isak and co.
While Howe opted for gentle rotation, making five alterations to the XI that started last Sunday’s 2-1 Premier League defeat at Stamford Bridge, Maresca changed Chelsea’s entire lineup. Perhaps such wholesale, eleven man churn was responsible for the early moment of kamikaze style visiting defensive chaos that prefaced Isak swinging in an inviting cross and Joelinton spurning a close-range sitter after miscuing an attempted right-foot shot.
Yet if Chelsea were repeatedly self-destructive at one end, their counterattacking pace ensured they remained capable of endangering the home defence and it took a timely block on Sandro Tonali’s part to divert Renato Veiga’s goal-bound shot.
As Maresca’s team began looking increasingly, if deceptively, comfortable in possession, Howe urged his players to press their guests ever harder and higher, and this policy soon paid dividends. An amalgam of overconfidence and casualness as Chelsea’s Benoît Badiashile and Veiga attempted to pass out from the back was met by ruthless pressing …
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