Should Eddie Howe be under more – or at least some – pressure at underperforming Newcastle? | OneFootball

We understand all the reasons why Eddie Howe isn’t currently under pressure.

He delivered some of the most long-awaited silverware in the land to Newcastle last season. And then also delivered Champions League football again. The summer shambles that befell Newcastle was not in any way his fault.

And he is above all an English manager of the Spoke Well, I Thought school who looks like he listens to and carefully transcribes every single episode of the High Performance Podcast so he can really drink in all the valuable life lessons contained within.

Which an awful lot of the press pack in this country think is correct and good behaviour. They like Howe, who has no dubious foreign ways, speaks to them politely if with those eerie dead eyes, and there’s also clearly a lucrative ghost-writing deal for his autobiography out there for someone at some point down the line.

So yeah, we get all the reasons why the Newcastle boat remains so entirely unrocked.

But also aren’t they really quite sh*t? Like far, far sh*tter than it’s remotely necessary or acceptable for them to be in their Champions League-and-Saudi era? They are quite literally as bad as Tottenham, and Howe doesn’t even have Thomas Frank’s flimsy ‘I’m new here and this club is batsh*t’ excuse. And Frank is under immense pressure now.

Yet there’s Eddie Howe, just carrying on, his team showing desperately little fight and almost zero bottle in going down to a tame defeat in the first Premier League Tyne-Wear Derby in nearly a decade.

That’s not really acceptable is it, surely?

They really shouldn’t be as bad as this, stumbling along at the back of a deeply mediocre mid-table peloton, seemingly incapable of stitching together the kind of run that would get them out of there.

We’re not asking for Aston Villa-style ridiculousness here, but it does seem reasonable to think they shouldn’t be getting left behind by Brighton or Everton. Or most pointedly Sunderland, who now sit four points clear of their local rivals.

There’s a couple more things that explain the apparent lack of panic at Newcastle. That mid-table is awfully congested. Villa have already sauntered clean through it and out the other side. Everton had a little go at being fifth. Man United have been sixth here and there.

The point being: below the top three and above the bottom five the Premier League table, essentially, isn’t real and can’t hurt you.

Feels like that’s a dangerous mindset that could easily lead a daft big club into trouble, but it’s also reasonable to be less bent out of shape about being 12th when the top five is four points away rather than 10.

The other thing is that the fact there is absolutely no peril or jeopardy in the Champions League now – we designed it that way – means Newcastle are in no danger of messing that up in the way they ultimately (if slightly unfortunately) did a couple of years ago. They’ve hit the odd wrinkle, but still sit four points above the generous 24th-place cut line with two games to go.

We still can’t quite shake the sense, though, that Newcastle are having really quite a bad season, one that reinforces the growing idea that they can’t put two good seasons together and compete on all fronts, and nobody seems to be losing their sh*t about it.

That’s no good at all. We thought this was Modern Football with all its instant gratification and baying for blood.