We’ll say this for Newcastle United at the moment: they’re dependable. Just not in the ways Eddie Howe would like.
There was an Alexander Isak goal, of course, the striker thumping a penalty into the top corner, before Yankuba Minteh atoned for having given away that spot kick against his former club by scoring the equaliser for Brighton.
But Fabian Schar’s injury time strike after the game went to ten men versus ten had to be disallowed, not just because he was correctly adjudged to be offside, but because it is a cosmic rule of nature that Newcastle just don’t do late goals at the moment.
That’s about as good an explanation for the phenomenon as we are able to muster, but Newcastle’s slump back into poor league form has definitively coincided with a dreadful habit for going missing in the last half-hour of games.
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Howe’s side have conceded eight goals after the hour mark across five of their past six Premier League games; the exception was against Southampton, and so doesn’t count. In that time, going back to 18th January, Newcastle have scored none in the last 30 minutes of games, unless we include Joe Willock’s late winner against League One Birmingham City in the last round of the FA Cup.
It’s tempting to put that down to fatigue. Howe is not known as an adherent of squad rotation, and only Nottingham Forest (23) have used fewer players in the Premier League this season than Newcastle (24).
However, Howe might retort, if he had the data to hand, that Forest have notably done alright this season, and that Liverpool and Arsenal have also used just 24 players this season. Both Forest and Liverpool’s 11 most-used players have played more combined league minutes than Newcastle’s. And that’s to say nothing of Liverpool and Arsenal both having European commitments where Newcastle have had none. Both those clubs have played the exact same number of League Cup games; the difference provided by the FA Cup is negligible.
Unfortunately, none of that particularly helps the Newcastle boss out, in the end, because it only makes their tendency to turn into Lancashire cheese in the final 30 minutes even more inexplicable.
And, of course, if they can’t get it done in the last 30, then an additional 30 felt like a write-off. Throughout the first period of extra time, there was no particular sense that Newcastle would get the job done in extra time; they took their additional interval jaffa cakes having gone without a valid shot since the 73rd minute of normal time.
A flurry of largely speculative strikes early in the second period padded the stats and briefly gave the sense of momentum being gained – and yet it was Brighton who got the goal that won the game, Danny Welbeck making a sensational last-fraction-of-a-second adjustment to lift a brilliant finish past Martin Dubravka.
That now-constant issue means Newcastle will have to make do with one cup final this season, albeit surely without Anthony Gordon after his straight red card.
In-form Brighton, meanwhile, head into the quarter-finals with valid reason to dream of their first ever major trophy. The field is wide open.
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