Newcastle face familiar frustrations ahead of another awkward, difficult summer | OneFootball

It says something about the nature of this Premier League season that at this late stage of it you can have a team dropping a crucial two points in their pursuit of Europe while securing a point that guarantees safety.

There is a flatness to this league. There are two teams clearly better than anyone else. And two teams clearly worse than anyone else. In between there are good teams, bad teams and Tottenhams but a general sensation of meh.

Nottingham Forest and Newcastle spent most of this low-key 1-1 draw at the City Ground looking what the table will suggest them both to be, as the season’s stagger unwinds: solid lower mid-table fare. Not the best, not the worst, both awkwardly aware of a conspicuous failure to kick on from what did look like they might have been breakthrough seasons in 24/25. Only a point separated them last season, and it may be similarly close this time. Just with about 15 points and almost half-a-table’s difference.

Forest have at least had the good sense to make their own journey to lower-mid-table mediocrity more dramatic and, for a really very long time, precarious. The point they earned here from Elliot Anderson’s lovely late equaliser against his former club should be enough, by the end of this afternoon or failing that at close of business tomorrow night, to ensure there can be no further unpleasantness.

That is probably for the best. Their recent form has been stunning, but the endeavours of recent months appear to have taken their toll.

Injuries and the hangover from that crushing midweek disappointment in the Europa League semi-final second leg left Forest looking nothing like the team we’ve seen in recent weeks both domestically and in Europe.

With games to come against third-placed Man United and a Bournemouth side who seem determined to simply never lose a Premier League game ever again and – like Forest last year – in the hunt for an unlikely Champions League campaign, this point could yet prove a significant one for Vitor Pereira’s side. They really didn’t today look much like one that has a great deal left to give if they remain mathematically if not realistically in the soup.

For Newcastle, a familiar story in a season of near constant frustration. It was derailed at the outset by the Alexander Isak Saga and has, in truth, never really got going.

But a huge part of that has been the inability to hold on to a lead. Harvey Barnes looked like he’d won them all three points, which would have meant securing European football next season remained realistic despite their assorted disappointments.

Yet, as so often seems to happen for this Newcastle side, that hope was extinguished.

Barnes’ goal made this the 23rd Premier League game in which Newcastle have led this season. That’s a total only the top three can better. Yet Newcastle have fewer wins to their name this season than Fulham.

Ten times Newcastle have been pegged back, with the relief – such as it is – that it was only to turn a win into a draw rather than defeat. Seven times they have lost after going in front this season; two more than Palace, three more than West Ham and at least four more times than anyone else.

Newcastle have lost 27 points from winning positions this season. Seven more than anyone else, and leaves them one of only six teams whose points-lost total exceeds the number of games in which they’ve led. The company they’re keeping shows how bad that is; four of them are already down or the only remaining live contenders for the final relegation spot.

Big summers, awkward conversations and difficult decisions await at both clubs whatever happens over the closing fortnight of the season. They’ll both still be, and there are others who’d be glad to say the same. But there’s a question of identity at stake with this pair.

What do they want to be? What do they think they are? How far apart are reality and aspiration?

Forest at least appear to have found a manager who can work with this talented group of players but also an absurd and volatile chairman. Even here there must be caution given how Vitor Pereira turned Wolves around last season and how he then started this one.

It’s been said plenty by now, but one does always wonder how much his Englishman-in-a-big-job credentials insulate Eddie Howe from greater scrutiny. There’s only one foreign manager we can imagine ever being afforded the slack Howe has been granted this season, and that’s mainly because it’s Thomas Frank (the least foreign of all the foreign managers anyway) and we don’t have to imagine it.