In the world of sports, you can dominate a game every single week but if you don’t take advantage of your chances and score, you will not win; it’s as simple as that. That seems to be a reoccurring theme for Newcastle in the past month (missed opportunities versus Villa, Everton and Arsenal today). Wijnaldum and Mitrovic both had chances to give NUFC a 1-0 lead but Peter Cech was on top of his game. In the 72nd minute, Laurent Koscielny gave Arsenal a 1-0 lead and that would be the final score line. Newcastle stay in the bottom 3 of the standings (18th), 2 points ahead of Sunderland (who won today) and 2 points behind Swansea (who lost today). Here are my 5 thoughts on the match:
because of where we were in the league . And some of those transactions we brought forward from the following summer at significant cost. As a general principle, January’s not an attractive window”. Hmm, if Newcastle United were spending 2 years ago in January because of “where they were in the league”, where does that put them now in terms of needing players? The window that Lee Charnley was referring to, NUFC brought in Sissoko, Debuchy, Gouffran, Haidara and Yanga-Mbiwa. Will they repeat the same sort of transfer window as January 2014? The only real reasoning why they wouldn’t, in my eyes, is because Mike Ashley just spent ~£50M over the summer and will refuse to spend any more. Unfortunately, if he wants to stage off relegation, he will definitely need to spend. Another striker, LB, CB, creative CM and winger are the obvious positions of need. However, with Riviere and Rolando Aarons on the verge of coming back, don’t be surprised if Newcastle target the CM, LB and CB positions as priority (you can read about my January transfer targets here). No matter how you look at it, Newcastle United is in big trouble and are in dire need of help. The board keeps backing up McClaren and say he is safe; well, the only other path is to bring in reinforcement via the window.