Brighton limbered up for this trip to Tyneside by working out with an acclaimed German cage fighter. The idea was that a spot of mixed martial arts training would toughen up Fabian Hürzeler’s players at set pieces and enable them to pack a collective punch far too powerful for Newcastle to resist.
Happily for Eddie Howe and his players it did not quite work out like that. As Yasir al-Rumayyan, Newcastle’s chair, and a delegation of his colleagues from the club’s majority owners, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, looked on from the director’s box, Howe’s team finally ended a debilitating run of five straight defeats.
