No one needs a second invitation to watch this Man City side, but it is not every day that 3,000 Geordies rock up in East Manchester, too. Was it any wonder, then, that Kevin Keegan made the short journey from his home in Hale to the Etihad on Sunday to witness Newcastle's United's 5-0 defeat against City and see that away end in all its glory?
Keegan was sat just a few rows behind watching owners Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi in the directors' box as the former Newcastle and Man City boss took in the game with friend Sir Brendan Foster. However brief, or otherwise, you suspect the quartet's paths will have surely crossed at some point.
The club's owners, after all, have been keen to speak to a number club legends, including Alan Shearer and David Ginola, to tap into their expertise. This is not a token gesture; the hierarchy genuinely want to reconnect with a host of club greats who felt ostracised during the Ashley era.
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At a time when the powers at be are working on sponsorship deals behind the scenes, in a bid to increase revenues, Keegan would be the perfect ambassador to sell the club across the globe. Whether such a role in football would even interest Keegan at this stage of his life remains to be seen, but the 71-year-old clearly did not want to pass up an opportunity to see his former side play in the flesh.
Newcastle still have an awful lot of work to do to even come close to emulating Keegan's great Entertainers side, but two key players have now returned who will play their part in that quest in Kieran Trippier and Callum Wilson. It has been a long time since Newcastle have been able to introduce two England internationals from the bench, but that is exactly what Eddie Howe did in the 68th minute against City after Trippier and Wilson recovered from their respective injuries.
The pair entered the field to a huge roar from the away end as they replaced Emil Krafth and Chris Wood and they quickly made an impact. Up until that point, Newcastle's best efforts in the second half were speculative, off target shots from distance from Bruno Guimaraes and Allan Saint-Maximin, but Trippier and Wilson quickly gave the visitors another dimension in the final third despite not playing for several months.
It was Trippier, for instance, whose teasing first-time cross nearly picked out Wilson in the 73rd minute before Fernandinho nipped in to head the ball behind. Newcastle's set-piece deliveries have not been great of late, but Trippier then found Jamaal Lascelles from the resulting corner. Ederson, however, was equal to the captain's header.
City were comfortable, but Trippier's crosses did finally ask one or two questions of his former side and another first-time delivery was headed back across goal by Aymeric Laporte to Saint-Maximin, who blazed over after cutting inside. As threatening as Trippier was going forward, though, the 31-year-old appeared to still be getting up to speed from a defensive perspective after Jack Grealish raced past him ahead of City's fourth goal and Kevin de Bruyne beat the out of position right-back in the air in the build-up to Raheem Sterling's fifth. Perhaps, that is understandable when parachuted into a situation like this against an opponent as good as City after a spell on the sidelines.
Similarly, at the other end, Wilson spurned a one-on-one opportunity he may well have taken when match sharp. The striker helped fashion one of Newcastle's best chances of the game in the 83rd minute after holding off Rodri and knocking the ball into the path of fellow substitute Jacob Murphy.
Rather than taking a touch, Murphy immediately played a defence-splitting pass to send Wilson clear, but the number nine's shot was blocked by Ederson. Yet, given how blunt Newcastle have been, even the fact that the striker stayed onside felt like progress after the Magpies' forwards were sloppily flagged offside on a whopping nine occasions against Liverpool the previous week.
It was hardly a surprise, then, that Howe remarked it was a 'massive boost for everyone connected to Newcastle' to have such 'huge' players available again after the 5-0 defeat. On their day, when fit and firing, these are the sorts of individuals even the watching Keegan would have loved to have had at his disposal.
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