Steve McClaren has reason to believe he can win a high-stakes game of snakes and ladders at Newcastle United but much hinges on his side’s next three fixtures.
The former England coach could easily have been sacked had Newcastle surrendered to Liverpool at St James’ Park on Sunday. Instead his struggling players finally fought back, provoking widespread astonishment by beating Jürgen Klopp’s side 2-0.
Afterwards McClaren talked of “lightbulb moments” and corners being safely navigated but his comments were studded with a thoroughly understandable caution. The 54-year-old knows that a team who have secured only three Premier League wins all season possess a penchant for repeatedly falling into “one step forwards, two steps back” mode.
The forthcoming matches at Tottenham on Sunday and then Aston Villa and Everton at home should tell him whether the success against Liverpool was simply part of this depressing pattern or a genuine turning point. Along the way Mike Ashley, Newcastle’s owner, is expected to decide whether to stick or twist – to keep faith with a head coach appointed only last summer or make a change which could preserve their lucrative Premier League status.
The good news for McClaren is that he faces a trio of trials by television. It is almost certainly coincidence but Newcastle’s three league wins so far arrived on afternoons when their games – against Norwich, Bournemouth and Liverpool – were broadcast live.
They will kick off at White Hart Lane still in the relegation zone but with mid-table safety within tantalising reach. It should soon become apparent whether an afternoon when Vurnon Anita and company succeeded in gegenpressing Liverpool into submission was a watershed, a cruel chimera or something in between.
Was the victory down purely to the efforts of Anita, Daryl Janmaat, Moussa Sissoko and Georginio Wijnaldum and friends or did a heavily rotated, jaded and quite possibly complacent Liverpool side experiencing an awful day at the office have more to do with it?
Were the 124 misplaced passes by Klopp’s players – Liverpool’s worst possession retention stats in a league game for five years – due to Newcastle’s harrying and closing down or more about a group of visitors being seriously slapdash? And what would have happened had Alberto Moreno’s brilliant but disallowed volleyed “equaliser” been allowed to stand as television replays suggested it should?
McClaren will quite rightly be inclined to point to the clear evidence of a team playing for their manager and for each other. He may also feel a certain tactical pragmatism had something to do with the victory.
Newcastle’s shape may not have altered from this season’s pretty much standard 4-2-3-1 – although their manager apparently toyed with a switch to 5-3-2 last week before being deterred by one of those “lightbulb moments” on Thursday night – but they looked much more like a Sam Allardyce side than the possession-obsessed unit who initially passed Sunderland off the pitch at the Stadium of Light in October only to end up, rather unluckily, losing 3-0.
Early on in the campaign McClaren and his young Scottish first-team coach, Ian Cathro, poached from the No2 role at Valencia, encouraged the team to build from the back so deliberately that players were asked to ensure they had control of the ball – and the game – by making six passes before moving forward into the next phase of play.
Now, though, it seems Newcastle’s staff are edging closer to agreeing with Alan Pardew’s assessment that, in the absence of a Yohan Cabaye figure in central midfield, the squad are not good enough in possession to try to emulate Barcelona and instead remain better deployed using their counterattacking pace to undo teams on the break.
McClaren described their second goal against Liverpool, created by Sissoko and scored beautifully by Wijnaldum, as summing up “the real strength of our team” and “all that’s best about us”.
It was noticeable that there was much less playing the ball around in areas which were rarely going to hurt Liverpool and much more high-tempo intensity once possession was obtained. Longer, earlier passes look as if they may become an increasing part of Newcastle’s armoury.
Providing it can be sustained, a new-found unity and “one for all, all for one” attitude should also help. “Criticism is always hard to take,” said Wijnaldum. “But a lot of the criticism, to my mind, was right because we didn’t have good performances. You can lose games but the way we were losing games was really bad because the performances were not good and we didn’t do it as a team. If everyone plays their own game, it’s difficult to win. But we’ve learnt. Against Liverpool we did it differently. We fought as team.”
McClaren can only hope such endeavour will be replicated at White Hart Lane and then against Villa at St James’ Park. Whereas he can now almost certainly survive a stumble on Sunday, Newcastle’s manager will not care to contemplate the potential consequences of failure to beat Rémi Garde’s side.
