Three words to describe how I currently feel as a Newcastle fan? Still Quietly Optimistic

We wanted to get a snapshot of how Newcastle United fans are thinking.

Three months into the season and 17 matches played so far across three competitions.

As we are heading out of the November international break and Newcastle United fans having seen their team win eight games, draw three, lose six.

Those results summing up a start to the season with plenty of ups and downs.

Plenty to talk about as we ask a number of Newcastle United fans, who are regular/irregular contributors to The Mag, to give us their views on the season so far, plus what will happen as we move forward.

Next up is Billy Miller answering the questions.

Three words to describe how you currently feel as a Newcastle fan?

Still quietly optimistic.

Three words to describe Newcastle United now?

Lethargic, inconsistent, unimaginative.

You’re probably thinking this completely contradicts my first answer but although I’d use these three words to describe our recent performances, I have full faith in us to turn things around.

Alexander Isak – Time to forgive and forget…?

I’ll admit that I am not on the extreme end of the hate scale with Isak.

He is still someone that I consider to be partly responsible for the greatest moment in my Newcastle supporting life. Saying that, his conduct in the summer was disgraceful. I take great pleasure in seeing him struggle in a Liverpool shirt. I watch nearly as many Liverpool games as Newcastle ones this season, always cheering the opposition and hoping Isak has a stinker. But I do appreciate the player he was for us, the memories he gave us and the enormous sum we got for him.

The way he derailed our summer and arguably our entire season to date is indefensible, so I won’t forgive or forget that. He has torn up his legacy and won’t ever be considered a legend or fan favourite in the North East. But I’m not one of these fans that only refers to him as the rat now. I think that’s wholly unfair… those poor rodents don’t deserve that association.

If you had to choose. A win against Sunderland but lose to Fulham in Carabao Cup quarter-final, or lose to Sunderland and go through to Carabao Cup semi-finals?

Hard call. One that I’m not going to make. Instead, I am going to give my opinion that I think we’ll win both.

Fulham at home in the cup is a game we absolutely have to be winning.

Regarding the Sunderland match, football throws up these sorts of stories. I think we’ll come away from Everton’s new gaff without three points and go to SOL as the surprising underdogs and with that lot full of confidence. It’ll be set up as the perfect scenario for us to go and play them off the park, snatch our first away win of the season, get a nice victory photo in front of the fans in the away end and turn everything around, rapidly passing them in the table and waving jubilantly as we do so. That’s the dream anyway.

Would winning the Carabao Cup again this season BUT finishing outside the Premier League top six, be success or failure?

Huge success.

Even if we finished bottom half of the table but won a trophy, it’d qualify us for Europe. We’d have an excellent chance of winning one of the lesser European trophies and I’m all for that. I also think with the level of opposition in those competitions, we could rest and rotate a lot more in Europe meaning our star players are less fatigued for the league campaign which could give us the platform for our strongest assault on the league yet.

Eight months ago, Eddie Howe banked the first trophy for Newcastle in 56 years, then two months later secured a second Champions League qualification in three years. Some Newcastle fans appear to be questioning his position now. What are your thoughts on Eddie Howe and how much more time has he earned to get the league position sorted and beyond that, or not?

For me, Howe is untouchable this season. He has done too much and taken us too far to be questioning him 11 games into the Premier League campaign.

If it was up to me, he gets all this season and at least half the next. If we finish bottom half this season, I’d be frustrated but I would put it down to a bad season and not lose complete faith in our manager. If we were in a similar situation halfway through next season, I may feel differently.

The way I see it is if we’d had Steve Bruce for four years and he’d finished 13th, 12th (as he had done), then say 17th (would have been extremely lucky to do so the way we were going the season he left) and 15th before then 11 games into his fifth season he had us in the top five, I wouldn’t suddenly be saying that Bruce is the man for the job all of a sudden and we’d been wrong about him all along.

Eddie Howe is the reverse of this and every season under him has been a success. If we have one bad season (which isn’t even guaranteed yet) it doesn’t make him a bad manager and doesn’t mean we need a change. I stand by my belief that Howe will be here for many years to come and will be stocking up that long-neglected trophy cabinet.

What do you think about how the summer transfer window was conducted by Newcastle United?

Obviously, a lot of the signings came in late, but that was more down to early targets choosing other clubs. Could we have looked at players earlier in the window that weren’t attracting the top clubs? We could have and we would have done our business a lot more efficiently but if we want to compete with the big clubs for the top places, it makes sense that we compete with them for top players.

In hindsight, if we’d sold Isak early and as a knock on effect had had a free run at Ekitike that may have meant we started the season in better form. He looks a quality player and as close a replacement to Isak as we could have got. That being said, Ekitike loves turning us down so may well have been poached by someone else had Liverpool backed out. I think Woltemade is a tremendous signing and will do the business for us long term, but his addition does mean that we need to adapt to a whole new way of playing. I believe we have come out of the summer significantly stronger than we entered it.

In the future after they have all finished their Newcastle United careers, what is your guesstimate on how the six summer signings will each be assessed. In each case – Thiaw, Ramsdale, Ramsey, Woltemade, Elanga and Wissa to be seen as one of these three choices – A success, Done OK, Failure.

I think all will be successes if they’re here for more than a season. It’s easy to write off Elanga who has started slowly or Wissa who’s not even graced the pitch yet, but all the players we’ve signed are quality additions and over time I think we’ll see that.

My one fear with Ramsdale is he doesn’t ever get a chance to prove himself and is allowed to return to Southampton without his transfer clause being activated. I’ve always massively rated Ramsdale and believe he could be our number one for the next five years or so if he gets the opportunity to show his worth.

What do you see as three positive things for Newcastle United so far this season?

Strength in depth. I genuinely believe the squad is the strongest it’s been since the takeover, and we have genuine competition in every position.

Lack of injuries. I know we’ve got a few but combined with my above point we’re so far away from the situation a couple of seasons ago when our bench was regularly occupied by goalkeepers and academy players.

CarabHowe Cup form. It’s incredible that we’ve reached our fourth Carabao Cup quarter final in four years. That’s the same amount of Carabao Cup quarter final appearances as the previous sixteen seasons combined and we never once saw a semi final in all that time. We’re a home game away from our third semi final in four seasons and haven’t fallen behind in a single game in that competition since the 2023 final. It’s an astonishing feat. It’ll be tough to retain the trophy with Man City, Arsenal and Chelsea still in the competition but we’re capable of doing it if we get back to our best.

What do you see as three negative things for Newcastle United so far this season?

Results and form. We started the season with some good displays but didn’t get the results but recently we’ve been so poor.

League position. In the Premier League anyway. Our Champions League position is another positive although we do have three away games to navigate in that competition yet. I don’t think many of us would have predicted being 10 places below Sunderland at this stage of the season.

Lack of creativity and goal contributions from the wingers. This has been a huge issue. Our formation is designed for the wingers to get in behind and create and score goals but we haven’t done enough of it. We’ve had to change our way of playing to accommodate a different style with our big German, but the wingers have still been hugely out of sorts for many games this season. I’d argue Murphy has been our best performing winger so far. Barnes has scored a few decent goals, and Gordon has impressed in the Champions League, but none have been a consistent threat. Elanga has been non-existent. They are all quality players though and I think there’ll be a point in the season where they’re all firing and it’s harder to work out who to leave out than who to pick.

Sunderland are now back in the same division and at this moment ahead of NUFC, your thoughts?

My Sunderland supporting friend is a little overhyped about their successes so far. He asked me if they got into Europe, did I think their takeover would be judged more successful than ours.

Firstly, we’re 11 games in. Get excited about Europe when we’re 30 games in. It shows how little recent Premier League experience they’ve got. How many teams have we seen start strongly and finish nowhere near Europe? Also, it would be an outstanding season if they did qualify for any form of Europe, however that would be the one truly great achievement of their ownership. Granted they have had two promotions, but neither was particularly impressive, and it took a lot of luck to get through last season’s playoffs. We got out the Championship twice as winners under the stewardship of Mike Ashley!

I won’t deny Sunderland have been impressive in their early exchanges, but they got dumped out of the Carabao Cup at the first attempt (by a league one club), whilst we are in the quarters of that competition, are sixth in the Champions League and previously avoided almost certain relegation, won a trophy and qualified for Europe’s elite competition twice since our takeover.

Anyway, what was the question? Oh yeah, my thoughts are that it is good to have the derby back. As I mentioned before, I do think we’ll beat them next month despite our indifferent form. I’d be amazed if they finished above us, but they should definitely stay up now. I just hope they hang around long enough for us to exceed the old six in a row to leave them with nothing to hang onto.

What would represent success in the 2025/26 season for Newcastle United?

Pushing for Europe again. I’d be happy with any European competition we can squeeze into. Decent runs in all three cup competitions would be a good tonic to an out of sorts league campaign.

With NUFC now having won a trophy…has that changed your priorities at all with the club now balancing getting Champions League football on a regular basis, compared to try and win cups?

We know we need regular Champions League football to attract and retain the best players however we are allowed to have the odd season out of the competition. We’ve seen Liverpool, Chelsea, Man United, Tottenham and Arsenal all fail to get into the Champions League at least once in the last four seasons and none of those clubs suddenly had a mass exodus of all their talent. If we missed out two or three seasons in a row it’d probably hit our recruitment, but I don’t think it’s the be all and end all.

What are your thoughts on the fact that we are now more than four years after the takeover and still no plans announced on a new training ground, nor a far bigger capacity stadium (either brand new one, or an increased capacity St James’ Park)?

It is surprising. The negative side of me thinks it shows just how vast PIF’s investment portfolio is and how little we actually matter in the overall scale of things. If our growth was an absolute priority, you’d think the stadium plans would have been pushed through by now. The positive side of me considers that this is a one-off opportunity and they want to get it absolutely right. Personally, I am happy to wait as long as they do get it absolutely right. Adding 8,000 seats to St James’ or building a new 65k seater stadium wouldn’t hit that brief. We need a mega stadium to satisfy to demand and announce us as one of the top teams in the country.

With Birmingham City announcing a 62k state of the art stadium about to be built whilst languishing in 11th in the Championship, I’d hope that is the wake up call that we need a capacity far exceeding what’s been discussed so far. I genuinely believe 80k should be the minimum and I still think we’d sell it out.

Would you say winning the Carabao Cup last season has made you more content, or now more desperate to get the next one?

I definitely don’t want to wait as long for the next one but I am contented having witnessed it. Many won’t have seen that in their lifetime and we are the lucky ones that have. I want to see us making a real go of the cups every season though and am confident another trophy will be banked before the end of the decade.