Fabricio Coloccini will be offered a final chance to prove he remains the right man to captain Newcastle United when Steve McClaren’s side visit Crystal Palace on Saturday.
The Argentinian centre-half has been in poor form during recent weeks and Newcastle’s manager is equally concerned about his latterly less than inspiring leadership. Matters came to a head during a series of heated training-ground exchanges this week. Although Coloccini seemed the butt of McClaren’s frustration others, most notably the France midfielder Moussa Sissoko and the Serbia striker Aleksandar Mitrovic, were also singled out for criticism.
The former England coach’s side have won only two Premier League games all season and he was left seething following their 3-0 surrender to Leicester City at St James’ Park on Saturday. Shortly after the final whistle, McClaren said Vurnon Anita, the midfielder, was the only player exempt from blame.
Perhaps inevitably, the normally calm and measured manager left several players stunned with an apparently spectacular loss of temper on Monday. With the first-team coach Ian Cathro’s relationship with certain players also believed to be strained, tensions are said to have continued to simmer but it is understood a reconciliation has been reached.
Coloccini will retain the armband at Selhurst Park after promising to up his game, and Sissoko and Mitrovic are also expected to start after McClaren seemingly resisted the temptation to drop them. Should Coloccini disappoint once again, Daryl Janmaat, the Holland right-back, would be the most likely replacement as captain. This week McClaren was assured by Lee Charnley, Newcastle’s chief executive, that his job remains safe but John Carver’s successor is well aware that attempting to shock players into a response with a show of temper is a card usually only effective if used rarely.
The manner in which Coloccini, Sissoko, Mitrovic and others react on Saturday will reveal much about the scale of the task confronting him on Tyneside. The immediate challenge in south London is complicated by the fact that, as Newcastle’s manager until last January, Palace’s Alan Pardew knows an awful lot about McClaren’s squad. Perhaps ironically Pardew was desperate to sign Coloccini in the summer.
Mitrovic, meanwhile, maintains he is not overweight, despite putting on two kilos since arriving from Anderlecht last summer. “It’s true that I have two kilograms more now than when I came to Newcastle but it is in the muscles,” he said.
“It’s in agreement with the club. I’m working on muscle mass because of the extra demands of the Premier League. My weight has always been between 84 and 86 kilograms, now I’m 88kg, but that’s what I wanted. The fat is in the ideal proportions.”
