This is the thing that’s seemingly not appreciated by those who have gone as far as to suggest he should be sold. He is one of our bravest players with the ball. Constantly offering a pass and always trying to make something happen. We have too many players who treat the football like a grenade.
He's a bit of a doubt for me too, but that's probably in a different way Young players should be a bit fearless , he's always looked a bit fearful
Fortunately for us last season, Stoke and Swansea got worse too. Other than Huddersfield replicating WBA, there's not currently any sign of our fellow strugglers getting worse.
Are they? They had some disappointing results in December, and yet took 6 points in 7...pretty well in line with their seasonal results to date. It's a blip rather than a freefall; we gained all of one point on them.
You can go back further. They had the fixture list from hell to start with (the reverse of which they have just walked straight into, by the way, - so expect some more defeats coming their way in the coming days and weeks), but since that ended with the Man Utd defeat on 6 October - almost three months ago - they've beaten Watford, Bmouth, Burnley and Huddersfield, and drawn us, Watford, Fulham and Everton. Yes they've lost to Wolves and West Ham during that period, but Wolves' counter-attacking football makes them a very dangerous away opponent - and it's not like Newcastle are the only team to lose at home to West Ham...
Newcastle had ten men for a large chunk of the Wolves defeat too and it still took a stoppage time winner iirc.
Yeah, I mean, Newcastle objectively has a poor squad, but they look pretty stable to me. They're built to win 35-40 points under ideal circumstances and hope to scrape 17th, and they are pretty well situated to accomplish that.
Whilst Rafa is there, they should be fine. Just. That said, I do think it's a good thing for us that they've now got hard fixtures followed by easy fixtures - as opposed to the other way around. I'd expect them to pick up points in their easy games regardless (like they have over the past three months), so if they were doing that over the next three months, that could raise their confidence levels sufficiently high enough to then cause a few upsets against the bigger boys towards the back end of the season. But playing the big boys now, I'm expecting a string of defeats.
