Newcastle timing off in the summer and off now; they have sleepwalked into crisis

In football, as in comedy and indeed life itself, timing is everything. And this season Newcastle’s timing is absolutely terrible.

It started in the summer, with a mess that was not particularly of their own making but a mess nonetheless. The late-summer explosion of Alexander Isak Saga was terrible timing.

There is no good time for that kind of shenanigans, but your man Macbeth had it right: If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done quickly.

Shakespeare scholars remain divided on whether the daft Scottish over-thinker had protracted transfer sagas specifically in mind there, but there’s no doubting that once the outcome of the Isak caper was clearly not going to go Newcastle’s way, it would have been far less painful had it all played out earlier in the summer. Had Newcastle had time to put a proper plan in place.

We’ve all had our fun at the saltiness pouring out of Bayern Munich’s unhappiness at Newcastle paying such crazy money for Nick Woltemade, because Bayern believe they have a divine right to hoover up all good German players should they wish to do so. But they did have a little bit of a point. It was a wild amount of money spent in a wild fashion.

He isn’t really the right profile of striker for Newcastle’s football, but his purchase was one of pure desperation. A transfer about optics as much as it was about football. Newcastle had to look like they were doing something to address the cavernous hole being left in their gameplan, even if what they did wasn’t really a great idea.

It is to Woltemade’s enormous credit and just in general quite funny that despite it all, and despite Newcastle’s wider struggles, that he has fared at least as well as and in several cases – including above all Isak’s – far better than any of the other big-money final-piece-of-the-puzzle strikers signed over the summer.

But Newcastle’s bad timing in the summer has reared its head again. If challenged to sum up Newcastle’s Premier League season in a word we would, until the last couple of weeks, have gone for ‘nondescript’. Not good, not bad, not particularly noticeable one way or the other.

They hadn’t had the same result in successive games and were kind of chugging along in that big pack of teams in mid-table. The eye-catching stuff was coming in the Champions League and in their Carabao defence.

Now, though, Newcastle have found some consistency at the worst possible time in the worst possible way.

Having not managed the same result in consecutive Premier League games until the weekend, they’ve now achieved consecutive identical scorelines in the same depressing way and even in the same city.

Early 1-0 leads at West Ham and Brentford have ended in consecutive 3-1 defeats. That’s bad enough, but doing that right before the November international break when there is literally nothing happening and two weeks of dead air simply must be filled with any old sh*te? Really, really bad timing.

Newcastle have moved to crisis-adjacent status at the worst possible time of the season to try and sneak it in without attracting attention.

They’ve slipped out the back of the Premier League’s mediocrity peloton where just five points separate third from 13th. The gap between Everton at the back of that main pack and Newcastle is now three points – bigger than any other current gap between any position in the division outside the extremes of the summit and basement.

Newcastle are now closer to the relegation zone than they are to even the back of a mid-table group comprising over half the league, with Eddie Howe now poised to assume Sack Race favouritism once Daniel Farke is put out of Leeds fans’ misery.

Because even the timing of other clubs’ bad spells is working against Newcastle right now.

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