Yet again, Eddie Howe found himself missing an entire team’s worth of Newcastle United players at the weekend.
Despite that, United remarkably still won away at Fulham and kept a clean sheet.
A brilliant outcome in anybody’s book.
I had to laugh at the comments after the match, as Fulham fans thrashed around like fish out of water, trying to diminish this Newcastle win in any way possible.
One of those attempts was to claim that actually the number of missing Newcastle United players was nothing out of the ordinary, that other Premier League clubs have similar issues but that doesn’t get highlighted by the media etc etc.
This was pretty ironic when taking into account that on Saturday, Fulham had all of their first team squad available, not a single player missing due to injury or suspension.
Anyway, whilst I know that we all as NUFC fans know just how crazy and unprecedented the numbers of missing players have been for Eddie Howe these past six months or so, I wondered if there was a way of better quantifying this.
To our enemies and outsiders in general, showing just how bad the impact has been in terms of unavailable Newcastle United players for the vast majority of this season.
What I came up with, was listing all of these 28 Newcastle United players in order of importance this 2023/24 season, with those in bold the ones who were unavailable at Fulham:
Alexander Isak
Bruno Guimaraes
Nick Pope
Joelinton
Anthony Gordon
Sandro Tonali
Kieran Trippier
Sven Botman
Fabian Schar
Joe Willock
Harvey Barnes
Dan Burn
Callum Wilson
Tino Livramento
Elliot Anderson
Sean Longstaff
Miguel Almiron
Jamaal Lascelles
Lewis Hall
Lewis Miley
Jacob Murphy
Martin Dubravka
Matt Targett
Emil Krafth
Matt Ritchie
Paul Dummett
Loris Karius
Mark Gillespie
So in my opinion, down at Fulham on Saturday, the unavailable Newcastle United players were in my opinion of importance and quality the 3rd, 4th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 13th, 14th, 17th, 18th, 20th and 23rd.
So in my opinion, five of our eight best / key players missing against Fulham.
Plus of course, 10th on my list above is Joe Willock, who was forced off on 40 minutes and back on the unavailable list.
We then have plenty of others who did play at Fulham and who have also missed sizeable amounts of this season, the likes of Barnes, Isak, Targett, Burn and Anderson.
Eddie Howe has been massively reliant on a small number of players who have been available week in week out and once again, the likes of Bruno, Gordon and Schar were key to Saturday’s win at Fulham, some of our best performers.