Eddie Howe walks Tyneside tightrope with ominous January fixture list ahead

Is Howe capable of breaking the pattern? If he cannot, he may find himself like Mark Hughes, an often-forgotten preamble to the more dramatic story to come.

STRESS TEST: Newcastle United manager Eddie Howe has called on his Newcastle players to stand up and be counted as they head into a “brilliant” January on the back of intensely difficult December. Pic: Mike Egerton/PA Wire.

When results go awry, football clubs tend to have only one response. Sometimes the act is undertaken with a sense of ruthlessness, sometimes relief, sometimes with the dutiful sombreness of somebody taking a faithful labrador to the vet for the final time, but always there is a feeling of necessity. “I’m sorry, Nigel/Antonio/Steve, but there’s no other way.” Inevitably, though, the result is the same: whatever is going wrong at the club, however good a job has been done before, the manager is the one who takes the blame.

That is just the nature of the modern game. Managers may just about be given time to work their way through a dip, but nobody ever sees the other side of a slough. Which should concern Eddie Howe. Newcastle are in a dip at the moment, the Christmas defeats by Luton and Nottingham Forest meaning they have lost eight of their last 12 games. They are out of the Champions League and the Carabao Cup and, while Champions League qualification is not out of range, a small gap is beginning to open. And January looks tough.