Some great mysteries endure, some just fade away. Does anybody talk about the Mary Celeste any more? The quest for El Dorado has run out of steam. Even, with all due respect to Visit Scotland, the Loch Ness Monster feels a busted flush. And Tottenham Hotspur are no longer fourth in the Premier League.
For weeks Spurs remained inexplicably in the Champions League qualification slots. They kept losing, kept being booed off, kept being embarrassed and yet always they clung to fourth. It was one of the world’s great mysteries. Graham Hancock wrote the sort of book on the subject that enrages academic historians and archaeologists. Mathematicians who had devoted their lives to unravelling the Riemann Hypothesis or Goldbach’s Conjecture were lured into a new field. Yvette Fielding and the restless spirit of Derek Acorah pitched a Sky Witness show about it. (And if any ghost can present a TV show, it is surely that of the popular Bootle-born medium.)
But, as it turned out, all it took to resolve the riddle was a pair of close‑range headers. Newcastle outplayed Manchester United from start to finish on Sunday and the consequence is that, if Tottenham avoid defeat at Everton on Monday to return to the top four – for like all the greatest mysteries, the myth of Tottenham’s Champions League qualification will not quickly be dispelled – it will be Manchester United who drop out.
Newcastle are up to third, level on points with Manchester United, whom they have not finished above since 1977, but with a far superior goal difference, and a point clear of Tottenham with a game in hand. A first Champions League qualification since 2003 is within their grasp.
As Newcastle lost three in a row – including the Carabao Cup final to Erik ten Hag’s side – it seemed possible their challenge for European qualification would falter, but not a bit of it. As they have won three in a row others have come to appear fallible. Alexander Isak, a mobile and intelligent centre-forward, was superb, his pass key to the deftly constructed opener. The wide forwards, Allan Saint-Maximin and Jacob Murphy, had the beating of their full-backs. And, perhaps most important of all, the midfield three was wholly dominant.
This was also a story of Mancunian capitulation. The scoreline was not as memorable as the 7-0 defeat at Anfield a month ago but the performance was not much better: Newcastle had more shots on Sunday than Liverpool had. This was the eighth game of a 10-game run of league fixtures in which Casemiro has either been suspended, picked up a suspension or let in seven and he is still sorely missed: Manchester United are two and half times more likely to lose a game when Casemiro does not play than when he does. Their midfield was overrun in the first half and, with more composure from Joe Willock or Sean Longstaff, Newcastle could have had a comfortable lead by half-time.
But modern football is about the collective. It is never about one area of the pitch. It did not help Manchester United that the ball never stuck, that they could never ease the pressure by holding it downfield. Before being withdrawn on the hour, Wout Weghorst managed just 10 touches, none of them good. A signing that had seemed a quirky flourish from Ten Hag has become increasingly baffling as time has gone by. Work rate and discipline are all very well but the Dutchman looks as he did at Burnley: a lanky forward who scores few goals, wins few aerials and is far from nimble.
Scott McTominay, fresh from his double for Scotland against Spain, was used high in the midfield in the first half, partly to try to quell Bruno Guimãraes. But that did not work and neither did he offer much from an attacking aspect. Manchester United’s two most advanced central players can rarely have possessed so little subtlety and guile.
It is a feature of Ten Hag’s management that he changes the disposition of his midfield while retaining the same personnel; at half-time he made the obvious shift and pushed McTominay deeper while advancing Bruno Fernandes who had cut an even more frustrated figure than usual in the first half, picking up the ball too deep and with too few options in front of him to be able to exercise much control on the game. It mattered little.
When Manchester United wasted time in the League Cup final, it seemed almost a self-conscious parody of Newcastle and their self‑proclaimed mastery of the dark arts: a gesture of “see how you like it”. Here, before half‑time, it was a matter of necessity to try to stem the Newcastle tide.
David de Gea made a perhaps fortunate double save in the first half and made a remarkable reflex block to push a Joelinton header against the bar in the second. He was almost certainly the visitors’ best player and yet it was his flawed attempt to play out from the back that gave Newcastle the throw-in that led to the opener. That is not necessarily to cast blame, more to highlight the mess Ten Hag inherited: his best goalkeeper struggles to pass out from the back, something that is essential to his vision of football.
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Newcastle, for now, have no such issues. If you can put aside the disquiet over the source of their wealth – as most of their fans appear to have done – they have spent wisely and the result is a coherent squad that has lost only three times in the league all season. Champions League football should be their reward.
