Eddie Howe is determined to prove he is the 'right man' to lead Newcastle United to long-term success on the one-year anniversary of the club's takeover.
Howe, like the rest of the football world, watched on from afar when the consortium finally completed their £305m buy-out last October. Little more than a month later, Howe was appointed as the club's new head coach after Steve Bruce was sacked.
Although Howe always knew he had a mid-season lifeline - the January transfer window - the Newcastle boss was parachuted into a dire situation long before that. Winless Newcastle were in deep trouble in the relegation zone at the time and the players were understandably low on confidence.
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However, Howe went on to oversee a remarkable turnaround, leading his side to an 11th place finish, and the head coach put pen to paper on a new long-term contract before the start of the new campaign. Newcastle have since made an encouraging start to the season and the seventh-placed Magpies have only lost one game so far.
Newcastle still have a lot of work to do, of course, but chairman Yasir Al-Rumayyan wrote about the club's ultimate objective to one day 'challenge for trophies both domestically and in Europe' in an open letter on Thursday. It goes without saying that Howe wants to be the man who delivers that success for supporters in the coming years.
"I'm here to try and prove that I'm the right man to lead the club forward - not just for now but for the future," he told reporters. "That is something you're judged on all the time.
"Every game, me and the players are judged in certain ways so I'm fully prepared for that. I have been since the day I walked through the door.
"I want to manage this club for a long time. That's only going to come down to me, my players and my coaching team so I'm fully prepared for that."
Howe had been Al-Rumayyan's personal choice after Newcastle's owners interviewed both the 44-year-old and Villarreal boss Unai Emery for the job last year. However, the board, made up of Al-Rumayyan, Amanda Staveley, Mehrdad Ghodoussi and Jamie Reuben, originally went for Emery because of his glittering CV.
We all know what happened next. Emery pulled out after being spooked by news of his supposedly impending arrival leaking out on the day of Villarreal's Champions League game against Young Boys. That left Howe to take up the reins.
"The moment I found out that it was myself and Unai going for the job, I sort of resigned myself that it wasn't going to be mine for obvious reasons when you look at his track record and the clubs that he has managed," Howe admitted. "So I was quite relaxed about the situation.
"I'm a believer in fate and certain things happening for a reason so if it wasn't meant to be, it wasn't meant to be. I couldn't get too down about it in that moment while there was obviously a huge sense of disappointment as well because I felt Newcastle was the one that I wanted.
"Mentally, I'm able to put those disappointments to the back of mind and, then, it came around very quickly and things changed. That's the fate part and believing something happens for a reason. Then I was only too pleased to take the opportunity."
Howe soon found himself fielding some very different questions to the ones he faced during his time at Bournemouth. The chairman of Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, after all, is Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the leader of a country with an appalling human rights record.
Newcastle Central MP Chi Onwurah told ChronicleLive this week that 'I don't think any fan can be happy where the money is coming from' while Sacha Deshmukh, Amnesty International UK’s chief executive, said 'the club is still being used to help sportswash'. Howe did not think twice when he took the Newcastle job, but does the Magpies boss understand why some people have been uncomfortable about the source of the money?
"Yes I do and I understand the question, but the owners' and directors' test, ratified by the Premier League, I have to have faith in that process," he added. "I've been the decision-maker behind where some of that money has gone and I've looked at it purely from a football perspective trying to recruit the best players for Newcastle."
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