I declared Eddie Howe could be our Alex Ferguson – I still stand by that | OneFootball

It’s been a tough Newcastle United opening to the season. It’s far from the disaster that some are painting, but it has been tough.

There’s been a strange pattern to it.

In the first four Newcastle United Premier League games we were well below par but ground out results winning three and drawing one. Then we were deservedly beaten by Fulham. Our next four games, we played well but didn’t take our chances, drawing two and losing two.

Then we deservedly beat Arsenal.

After ten games Newcastle United sit in eleventh. However, we are only three points off the top four and four points off the top three and we’re in the quarter final of the Carabao Cup. Hardly catastrophic.

Remarkably, it’s Forest that are third in the table currently. We play them on Sunday and, if we win, we will be a point behind them. Of course, if we did lose, we’d remain in the bottom half, be seven points below them and likely six off the top four, but my stance won’t change.

Yes, it’s easy to write about this after the two big wins over Chelsea and Arsenal at St James’ Park last week, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about since the Chelsea loss that preceded those. It’s something I thought about after the Everton draw and again after Brighton.

It’s not everyone.

I read plenty of supportive messages for Eddie Howe but there’s been a fair amount of ‘he’s taken us as far as he can’, ‘he’s out of ideas’, ‘we’re too predictable’, ‘he’s not getting the best out of the team’ etc etc.

I remember reading one comment from a Newcastle United fan saying they were fed up with the season already and that we’d never qualify for Europe now. This was after nine games. Nine games!

If you go through those games that we didn’t get the deserved results in, we created plenty of chances and didn’t allow our opponents to make many of their own. Poor finishing and some individual errors were the reasons we dropped points. It wasn’t the Newcastle United players not performing for Eddie Howe. It wasn’t us being too predictable.

Have we already got to that stage where we’re so used to doing well that a brief spell of underperformance and then results not matching performances leads to the vocal minority campaigning for a change of manager?

Eddie Howe has been a victim of his own brilliance.

Had we crawled to survival, rather than galloped, in his first season, and then pushed into the top half the following season before maybe matching last season’s achievements, we may have had a little more collective perspective. Of course, we may not have.

There may have been the same calls that we should have been competing more by now given the money spent. The convenient ignorance that many other teams have spent similar amounts (or a lot more), most of those with stronger squads, better infrastructure and an abundance of tradable assets that can support their continued growth.

However, it feels like the trajectory that Eddie Howe has taken us on has left some sections of our support already gaining a sense of entitlement that we should be in that top four forever more.

One day I think we will be but finishing top four in 2022/23 and qualifying for the Champions League was an incredible overachievement.

Last season was challenging but respectable and we only missed out on European football due to Manchester United putting in their best performance of the season for the FA Cup final.

This season hasn’t been immaculate but we’re only just over a quarter of the way through it. There is so much football to be played.

Yes, we could have easily lost to Bournemouth and Wolves (I don’t think Tottenham threatened us all that much despite their possession and overall shots). By the same token we were excellent against Man City and definitely should have beaten Brighton and Everton based on our performances in those games. Had we won those latter two, we’d be sat in third and everyone would be jubilant. Over the course of a season these things will average out and we’ll learn our true position. Eddie Howe deserves this full season as the absolute minimum.

I wrote an article when he first became manager in which I recorded his astonishing achievements with Bournemouth and declared that I felt he could be our Alex Ferguson. I still stand by that. He could be better than Alex Ferguson because he’s not an intolerable bully (although some may argue that was part of what gave his team an edge).

A lot has been said of Klopp and Arteta taking a few seasons to really get going. Both of those two came into teams with much stronger squads and recent successes, yet took time to turn them into powerhouses. Given time, I have utter belief Eddie Howe will win us our first trophy. I also believe he will win us our second, our third…

There genuinely isn’t a manager I’d prefer in our dugout.

If we look at Ferguson himself. He joined Manchester United in November 1986. In the five years preceding his arrival, they had finished fourth three times in a row and third the two seasons before. In Ferguson’s first season they finished eleventh. The next year they picked up and finished second, but then in the following two seasons it was twelfth and then thirteenth. That thirteenth placed finish would surely have done for him if not for his side going all Ten Hag in the FA Cup final and winning a bit of silverware. After that it was one sixth placed finish before finishing runner up. Nobody would ever doubt him again. His team won the title seven of the next nine seasons, finishing runners up in the anomalies. In his final 22 seasons at the club, they didn’t finish below third and won the title 13 times!

It’s all felt a bit Sir Bobby Robson recently.

Sir Bobby got us fourth, third and then fifth. In his last full season, we finished fifth and were one Drogba inspired Marseille away from the UEFA Cup final.

Yet a slow start (two draws and two defeats) to his following season saw some Newcastle United fans calling for Robson’s head. I’ll admit, I was one that felt it might be time to go in another direction. I will caveat that by saying I was sixteen when he was sacked and my time as a Newcastle fan had seen some great seasons under Keegan and Robson with a short period of dross in between. I didn’t have the maturity or experience to understand what a wonderful thing we had under our Geordie Knight. I have that now. If you’re not a child or a brand-new fan, my belief (and we all have our opinions) is that you should know better.

Sure, we would attract a much higher calibre manager than Souness if Howe left, and we may not witness the same level of squad decimation, but if a new manager came in and won a trophy and/or qualified for the Champions League in the following three years, I would never be convinced that Eddie Howe couldn’t have done precisely the same.

I believe Howe intends to be here for a long time. I don’t think another club job could tempt him away. The England role is the only one I’d be fearful of but I don’t believe he would consider that any time soon either. I think he appreciates the extraordinary opportunity he has here to build a lasting legacy and get his very own statue alongside that of Sir Bobby Robson.

If he wants the England role, he’s young enough to take it in ten/fifteen years and that’s plenty of time to do special things with us. Bobby deserved another season but realistically he was 71 when he was sacked. That season probably would have been his last anyway. It’s just a shame he couldn’t have seen it out on his own terms and helped plan for his successor.

The only way you can really measure how far a manager can take you is to give them time. Alex Ferguson didn’t win a trophy until his fourth season and he didn’t win the league until his seventh. That’s despite inheriting a team that had finished in the top four for five consecutive years before his arrival.

We still have a chunk of pre-Howe players here. Some are good enough, some aren’t, some won’t be in the coming seasons. I think we need Howe to be allowed five full seasons to truly shape a team and squad in his own image,

Are we so entrenched in an age of instant gratification that we can’t see how blessed we are to have this legend-in-the-making at our football club?