THE ATHLETIC
Newcastle smashed six goals past Tottenham Hotspur at St James’ Park to move above Manchester United into third place in the Premier League.
Eddie Howe’s side raced into a remarkable five-goal lead within 21 minutes, thanks to two goals from Jacob Murphy, two from Alexander Isak and one from Joelinton.
Cristian Stellini’s decision to switch Spurs to a back four backfired spectacularly and at half-time their goalkeeper and captain Hugo Lloris was substituted for Fraser Forster.
Harry Kane scored for Tottenham early in the second half before Callum Wilson made it 6-1 with his first touch after replacing Isak.
Sarah Shephard, Chris Waugh and Tim Spiers analyse the key talking points…
The doomed back four
Spiers: Spurs started a match with a back four for the first time in 15 months. It may be 15 years before we see it again.
Their defenders seemed unclear where to position themselves and Newcastle exploited the gaping holes with devastating accuracy.
And sure, Pedro Porro and Ivan Perisic aren’t full-backs, but to focus on the formation as an excuse for this humiliation lets the gutless players off the hook.
A switch in system doesn’t excuse Porro and Cristian Romero watching and gawping while Murphy opened the scoring, or the same two players letting a simple long ball over their head for Joelinton to double the lead after just six minutes.
Collectively Spurs were pathetic. An embarrassment to the club. Some of them are paid more than £100,000 a week to produce that.
There’s so much going on here. Spurs have a temporary head coach who’s out of his depth managing players who, even if they are being poorly coached or managed, should be ashamed of a performance which was a toxic cocktail of them being unmotivated, unprofessional, hapless and, in some cases, just not caring enough.
Their director of football had to resign this week because he’s been banned from football. And it’s all been presided over by increasingly unpopular owners who’ve made a series of bad decisions in the past three years.
This is the result. Spurs, you’ve outdone yourselves.
Only Haaland has better scoring rate than Isak
Waugh: He may have cost £60million, a club-record figure, last summer, and his introduction to life on Tyneside may have been disrupted by a four-month thigh injury, but Isak has proven in 2023 that he really could follow some of the great forwards to have led the line for Newcastle.
Although not an archetypal centre-forward, as Alan Shearer outlined here, he is a “modern forward” in the Premier League record goalscorer’s view. The 23-year-old can play anywhere across the frontline, he is relentless in leading Newcastle’s suffocating press and he is ever willing to track back and thwart opposition attacks, too.
Most importantly, though, he is proving himself to be lethal as a finisher. He has scored 10 goals, the most a Newcastle player has managed in their first 15 Premier League appearances since Papiss Cisse in 2012 (13 goals). More impressively, only Erling Haaland (a goal every 70 minutes) is scoring at a faster rate than Isak among players to have netted at least five times in the Premier League this season (every 97.3 minutes).
Remember, too, that Isak is keeping Wilson out of the side, a striker who has been involved in eight goals in his last nine starts (six goals and two assists) and scored with his very first touch against Spurs after replacing his fellow striker.
These two centre-forwards keep pushing one another to new levels, and Newcastle towards the Champions League in the process.
