Newcastle United were defeated with ease by Norwich City on Saturday. Will this loss wake the Magpies up?
Newcastle United are off to a horrible start this season after losing back-to-back games. The loss against Arsenal was expected and even though the Magpies did not look great, they did not look bad against a top six opponent. This past Saturday, though, Newcastle United supporters were ashamed to associate themselves with the club after Norwich City easily topped Newcastle United by a score of 3-1 at Carrow Road.
This is the third season in a row in which Newcastle United have failed to take three points on the road against newly-promoted sides on the road in the second week of the season. In 2017, the Magpies lost to Huddersfield Town (1-0), and last season a missed penalty from Kenedy led to a 0-0 draw against Cardiff City. Those were close games, whereas Saturday’s was far from competitive. The key question to ask as a result of this poor performance over the weekend is whether or not the Magpies can learn some meaningful lessons to improve going forward.
Hopefully…
I think we can all agree that the primary issue for Newcastle United over the weekend was a lack of collective urgency and effort. It was quite noticeable that Isaac Hayden and Matt Ritchie were the only players giving maximum effort for 90 minutes. This has bothered Steve Bruce as well and he made it clear that he will not tolerate this type of performance again.
Bruce decided to cancel the players’ day off yesterday and had every player attend an extra training session over the weekend to start correcting their mistakes ahead of this weekend’s clash against Tottenham.
Hopefully Jamaal Lascelles will learn some important lessons from Saturday’s loss. He put in a decent performance, but he did not fulfill his duties as the team’s captain. Lascelles needs to be more vocal and call out teammates when mistakes are being made.
Overall, the fact that this heavy defeat against a newly-promoted side occurred so early in the season should help the Magpies turn things around. There is plenty of time to keep this rocky ship from sinking, but the team needs to be willing to learn from Saturday’s mistakes quickly. Despite playing two quality opponents in Tottenham and Liverpool over the next few weeks, the Magpies can still earn six crucial points against Watford (8/31) and Brighton (9/21) at home. If the team fails to earn positive results from these games then we should unfortunately start pressing the panic button.