Newcastle United‘s midweek statement of intent has carried Eddie Howe one step closer to Europe’s small band of elite managers.
How else to process the scale of the success Howe has brought to St James’ Park in his 23 months in charge?
The team he inherited was bottom of the Premier League, rudderless, lacking condition and direction and with no discernible identity. Fast forward to Wednesday night and the brutal unpicking of a supposed European superpower, Howe overseeing a win ranks as one of the finest of the club’s modern era.
Of course he has been heavily backed in the transfer market, Saudi sportswashing cash funding the acquisition of class acts like Kieran Trippier, Bruno Guimaraes, Sandro Tonali and Sven Botman. The bill has been around £300m, although as Erik ten Hag and Graham Potter would testify, big spending is no guarantee.
Look again at the team that swaggered past PSG and consider that it included Jamaal Lascelles, a veteran of Newcastle’s Championship promotion campaign of 2016, Fabian Schar and Sean Longstaff, a player his predecessor did not believe was good enough for a campaign fighting relegation.
It has been seriously impressive work to coax such steep improvement from Longstaff, a player who has moved up several notches under Howe. Before he was a workhorse, now he marries industry with a football IQ that has blossomed under Howe’s tutelage.
But he is not alone: Anthony Gordon, who frightened the life out of Achraf Hakimi, now finally looks like the player every top club wanted, adding discipline and consistent attacking threat to his undoubted energy. Howe’s training ground tweaks – and a series of sit downs in the final months of last season – are undoubtedly responsible.
Howe has long been admired in the game and plenty saw through the relegation he suffered with Bournemouth, a disappointment that he learned from.
When he got the Newcastle job, one football figure who had worked closely with him at Dean Court rang to sing the manager’s praises. I consulted my notes not long ago and the conversation is revealing. “He is the English Arsene Wenger,” they said.
They had no doubt the FA would come knocking with an England offer in time, but reckoned St James’ Park was “perfect” for a boss who was picky about his post-Cherries career.
“The sky is the limit for him if he get backed. He can be in that elite conversation,” they said with certainty.
The reasons they gave were that his coaching was fresh and innovative, his tactical understanding of the game rich and also that he understood what made modern players tick.
“Just a superb man manager. Not soft on the players but builds good groups,” they said.
The source was keen to see how those skills he had utilised at Bournemouth would transfer to a bigger project where he would be signing elite players, with egos and expectations.
Wednesday gave an emphatic answer about the character of the squad he’s built: from his treatment of club captain Lascelles, no more than a reserve for most of last season but recalled in an emergency to play superbly at PSG, to Longstaff handing Kylian Mbappe’s jersey to teammate Kieran Trippier to give to his son Jacob.
He spoke effusively on Lascelles after the game, of his inner belief that the captain would come good. It is that loyalty that his players love.
It wasn’t spirit that beat PSG, though. Howe’s gameplan, the patterns that Newcastle used to press their opponents so effectively, were so impressive. He said before the game that his team would have to be perfect. They certainly were.
“It was two very good teams going up against each other and we had to try and unbalance them,” he said.
“They try to build from the back so we had to unsettle them, We were man for man at the back against elite players but that is our best way to be successful, especially here.”
It was always the case that to join the greats like Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, Howe would need to be tested against the best. In modern football that means the Champions League and with four points in the hardest group in the competition, he looks very much at home.
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