Eddie Howe gave his players a talk on Newcastle United's past earlier this season as the Magpies boss challenged the group to create their own history. The speech was accompanied by footage from the Entertainers era, but these players do not have to look even that far back for inspiration that they really can upset the established order. That is what Newcastle did in 2012, after all, when Alan Pardew's side broke into the top six.
There is a long way to go, of course, and these are two very different eras, but there are already some striking parallels between the first few months of these campaigns. Both Howe and Pardew set out to break into the top 10 after finishing in 11th and 12th respectively the previous season, but then saw the league open up after Liverpool and Chelsea made mixed starts. Like in 2011/12, present day Newcastle are also third in November with the best defensive record in the league. In fact, this current side are even the first Newcastle team since Pardew's to go 10 games unbeaten in the top-flight.
Newcastle's development under Howe has some of the Premier League's traditional big hitters worried so could they match or even better the Magpies' previous fifth-placed finish after the World Cup break? Dan Gosling, who was the only member of Pardew's squad to go on to work with Eddie Howe at Bournemouth, said it would be 'crazy' to think otherwise.
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"We got off to a good start in 2011 with the fans behind us and had a few special players that can just turn it on and that's what I see now, too," he told ChronicleLive. "There are players in key positions on form and playing well week in, week out.
"We had Papiss Cisse and Demba Ba up front and they were scoring for fun and we were beating top teams. That's what you've got to do to get into the top four and they are doing that now.
"They have nearly got a point off all the top teams: beating Tottenham away, beating Chelsea at home, drawing with City at home, drawing at Man United and they should have drawn with Liverpool if not beaten them away. To get results like that, you're a real threat to that top four. If they keep winning games and adding maybe one or two quality players in January, you just never know."
As Gosling alluded to, there are similarities between Howe's and Pardew's sides all over the park. Newcastle have a fine goalkeeper in Nick Pope just as they did in Tim Krul more than 10 years ago. The solid Magpies are hard to beat and difficult to score against like they were in 2011/12. Newcastle even have a talismanic playmaker in Bruno Guimaraes, who is the club's greatest midfielder since Yohan Cabaye pulled the strings on the way to that fifth-placed finish.
Further forward, if Newcastle need a moment of magic, Miguel Almiron, like Hatem Ben Arfa, is capable of something special. The returning Alexander Isak, Newcastle's £60m trump card, may yet even give his side a new dimension as Papiss Cisse did in the second half of that season over a decade ago.
Most eye-catchingly, as mentioned earlier, this team have the ability to claim a scalp as well as grind out a result and that was true of Pardew's team in 2012, too. Newcastle, after all, defeated Manchester United, Liverpool and Chelsea by an aggregate score of 7-0 in three sample games that season - and even a future title winner like Danny Simpson still savours 'every minute' of that campaign.
"We played Man United on my birthday," the former Newcastle defender told ChronicleLive. "It was a night game against my boyhood club and we won 3-0 at St James' Park.
"There was no better birthday present. It was one of the best birthdays you could ever ask for. It was crazy. I had all my friends and family at the game.
"We were on a wave and very unlucky to just miss out on the top four. If you look back now, it was actually quite a big achievement from where we were at the time to finish fifth just a couple of years after getting out of the Championship."
There were ultimately only four points in it as Spurs finished in fourth on the last day of the season - only for Chelsea to take that final spot in the Champions League after winning the competition six days later. Regardless, as Simpson said, finishing fifth was still a remarkable achievement for Newcastle and showed just what is possible with momentum, quality and, of course, spirit.
This was a tight-knit group, who had the ability to come from behind, as they did against Manchester United, Spurs, Aston Villa and Sunderland, and also recover from a poor run of form. That does not happen by accident.
In fact, before the season even started, Pardew lined up all his first-team players on one side behind the main building at the training ground as club staff introduced themselves to the players. Just as Howe gathers the current group for a team photo after wins, Pardew's message was similarly clear: this was going to take a united effort.
There were a number of sticky patches that season where it all could have unravelled, including a six-game winless streak, which included defeats against West Brom and Norwich, while the Magpies conceded 10 goals in the space of just three weeks at Fulham and Spurs. However, the group stood by one another and Simpson felt that 'togetherness gave you an extra five per cent'. Fellow full-back Davide Santon, meanwhile, believed that spirit and the talent Newcastle had were crucial to the Magpies' fifth-placed finish and the current group certainly have those qualities, too.
"Friendship is important, especially when you play football, so you understand what the other player wants on the pitch, what he wants from you and what kind of movement he is going to make," Santon told ChronicleLive. "Friendship helps with that, but you also need top quality to win games.
"Sometimes games were difficult and then you had Cabaye take a free-kick and put it in the top corner. They were the kind of players you needed. We were able to score at any time with any type of goal. I remember Ben Arfa, Demba Ba, Papiss Cisse. A lot of quality players. That's what you need if you want to get there."
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