Newcastle United have installed a new and expensive looking simultaneous translation booth at St James’ Park. Its role is to house an interpreter during Champions League related media events and ensure earphone wearing audience members can hear the insights of players and managers delivered in a preferred language.
The only problem is that, should Eddie Howe’s side fail to qualify for next season’s edition of Europe’s showpiece tournament – or, even worse, miss out on Europe altogether – that hi-tech cubicle will morph into a reproachful presence as it sits gathering dust in a corner of the press room.
Such a scenario would dictate that every time Howe glanced at the redundant booth, he would receive a reminder of what Newcastle were missing out on. Small wonder, then, that he is so keen to beat Arsenal on Tyneside on Saturday evening and start closing the six-point gap that separates his team from fourth place in the Premier League.
Although the club’s majority Saudi Arabian ownership have made no overt demands about Howe needing to repeat last season’s feat of finishing in the top four, there is a certain tacit pressure to not merely keep Newcastle firmly on the European map but continue the team’s extraordinary upward trajectory. Dropping out of the top six would provoke immense disappointment in Riyadh.
As excellent a coach as Howe patently remains, avoiding that fate is far from straightforward. Particularly in a season when the injury list is mounting and the summer’s £55m marquee signing, the Italy midfielder Sandro Tonali, has been banned for 10 months for contravening betting regulations in his home country.
While, among others, the Sweden forward Alexander Isak should return by December, Howe says “the next few weeks” will determine whether Newcastle’s important centre‑back, Sven Botman, requires knee surgery. If so, it could be months before the Netherlands defender kicks a ball competitively.
So far the understudies are doing just fine. Indeed, a starting XI featuring six full-backs and a central defensive pairing of Emil Krafth and Paul Dummett, who had started one game between them in the previous 14 months, comfortably beat Manchester United 3-0 in the Carabao Cup on Wednesday.
In theory at least, a Champions League, Premier League, FA Cup and Carabao Cup quadruple remains possible. But Howe is under few illusions that an impending, brutal looking run of fixtures contains the potential to derail such ambitions.
As if Champions League trips to Borussia Dortmund on Tuesday and Paris Saint-Germain at the end of the month were not tough enough, Arsenal and Chelsea visit St James’ Park on Premier League business either side of a visit to Howe’s old club Bournemouth.
“Qualifying for the Champions League again is something we’d love to do,” he says. “We’ve got some tough games coming up but we see ourselves as competitors. That’s the way we’re perceived internally.”
A ferociously aggressive, hard, high-pressing game has swept Newcastle to this point. It suggests all the hours Howe spent studying Marcelo Bielsa’s teams – Leeds at their very best included – and the sabbatical he partly devoted to watching Bournemouth’s current manager, Andoni Iraola, at work at Rayo Vallecano were not wasted. Perhaps the only nagging concern is that Newcastle could suffer the sort of physical and mental burnout experienced by Bielsa’s Leeds players.
After all, although his side are becoming a little more adept at slowing things down at times this season, Howe’s approach remains exceptionally demanding.
“We can always adapt our style slightly depending on the game but I think it’s very important to keep our fundamentals,” he says. “Intensity is part of how we play, part of our identity. We’ve had some bizarre, unlucky situations with injuries this season which wouldn’t have happened in another year. But I do believe we have the players, physically, who are able to deliver what we need.”
As someone who admits to being an a-ha devotee, Howe’s football has not always been so powerfully influenced by heavy metal pressing. At the outset of his coaching career he fell in love with Arsène Wenger’s post-Invincibles, Spanish style, pass-and-move Arsenal constructed around Cesc Fàbregas’s verve and vision.
“Arsène Wenger was one of the managers that most inspired me,” says Howe. “I used to watch his Invincibles but the team he created afterwards played some of the best football I’d ever seen.
“It definitely had an impact on my methodology and how I wanted my teams to play because it coincided with the start of my coaching journey. Arsène’s Arsenal was one of the teams I loved to watch and I openly admit I brought their tactical principles into my Bournemouth team. We ended up signing Jack Wilshere [on loan] as well. Jack was a player I loved to watch and he was brilliant for me.”
Yet or all Wilshere’s abundant technical gifts his type of midfielder would struggle to find a place in Howe’s relentlessly athletic pressing machine.
The latter’s efficiency will be fully tested by Declan Rice and the rest of Mikel Arteta’s players but, if that new translation booth is to continue in regular service, these are the matches Newcastle need to start winning.
“Arsenal will be a really big test of our credentials,” Howe says. “We’re going to have to find a way to make it difficult for them.”
