Perhaps Steve McClaren is right, and the experience he gained in difficult times earlier in his career will be brought to bear in a smooth escape from relegation for a desperate Newcastle side who now sit one place off the bottom. Maybe he has a point that adversity develops character, chiselling out hardened features that learn not to blink when confronted by the smallest hint of trouble.
At the moment both projections seem exceedingly generous to both manager and squad. The only surprise at Selhurst Park, once it became clear that Newcastle were in little mood to claw back a situation that had unravelled from promising beginnings, was that Crystal Palace did not score more than five goals and their latest embarrassment bred the thought that, for all the talk of long-term planning, what this team require is a brutal lesson in the basics.
“Every job I have started has been difficult at the beginning, right from my first experience at Middlesbrough where we lost the first four games [in 2001-02],” said McClaren.
“We were pointless and clueless, as we were called then, and it took a good six or seven months to get through that – really bad times. Then in the second year we built a bit of belief, but the first 18 months were very, very difficult. We expect the same here, but that’s what I can draw on.”
It is not an inaccurate reading of that period, but a deeper examination would not portend well. Where, for starters, can McClaren find characters with the fibre of Gareth Southgate, Ugo Ehiogu, Mark Schwarzer or George Boateng in this dressing room? Seemingly not in the shape of his captain, Fabricio Coloccini, who had been heavily criticised after the previous week’s 3-0 defeat to Leicester and responded by allowing Connor Wickham to hold him off too easily in the buildup to James McArthur’s deflected equaliser.
And apparently not even in the shape of Daryl Janmaat, another experienced performer who has been a rare positive for most of the past 15 months but failed to offer the slightest challenge to Damien Delaney as he headed on for Yannick Bolasie to score Palace’s fourth 97 seconds into the second half.
Janmaat had set up the game’s first goal, headed in by Papiss Cissé, but McArthur’s stroke of fortune and a drilled finish by Bolasie reversed the situation within seven minutes. If Newcastle can do one thing reliably it is to capitulate when the going gets tricky. Wilfried Zaha scored a bouncing volley before the interval and, by the time McArthur finished from an angle in added time, the thought occurred that at least they had not matched last month’s feat at Manchester City, where they conceded six times in 20 minutes after going ahead.
“They’re not doing it for each other – and sometimes it’s not about me, it’s about each other,” said McClaren. “That’s as a team, not just on the field but off it. When you’re a player it’s about peer pressure, it’s about not letting him down next to me, and him next to me. At the present moment we’ve not got that.”
Nobody doubts him on that point; there is little question that he has to oversee a squad of players who were not of his choosing and seem impossible to motivate. But McClaren cannot escape censure. At half-time he introduced a third centre-back, Jamaal Lascelles, in an attempt to stem the tide of incursions led by Wickham, Bolasie, Zaha and Jason Puncheon. A three-man defence was what Sam Allardyce, managing a similarly fraught situation at Sunderland, had deployed to fine effect against Palace five days previously on the way to a 1-0 win. The horse had bolted by the time McClaren made his change; he might not have been expected to directly copy Sunderland, but there was little evidence of any ability to match Allardyce’s tactical flexibility as Palace’s front four ran amok from the outset.
“There’s no panic,” said McClaren, who called his team in for extra training on Sunday nonetheless and may feel differently if his team sink further during a December that sees them face Liverpool, Tottenham, Everton and – perhaps most crucially – bottom-placed Aston Villa.
“We’re not panicking and I think that’s where experience will tell. We know we’re doing the right things – I know that through experience. In time, it will turn around and work.
“We will work with these players to develop character and fight through bad times. That’s when your character comes out.”
Man of the match Yannick Bolasie (Crystal Palace)
