On a bitterly cold Tyneside night West Ham finally remembered how to fight back. Even better for their beleaguered manager, Julen Lopetegui, a team inspired by standout performances from Tomas Soucek, Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paquetá exhibited the sort of ruthless precision strangely absent from Newcastle’s game.
Expertly taken goals from Soucek and the similarly impressive Aaron Wan-Bissaka reinforced Lopetegui’s fragile job security, lifting West Ham to 14th, six points clear of the bottom three and three behind Eddie Howe’s team as Newcastle’s hopes of Champions League qualification sustained a dent. It did not help the home cause that Alexander Isak, Bruno Guimarães and Anthony Gordon all had unusually poor games.
