Just over a year ago, Leicester crushed relegation-haunted Newcastle 4-0 at the King Power. An awful lot has changed…
It’s been a long year, but even so the contrast between Newcastle’s trip to the King Power today and the one they made 12 months and two weeks ago is extraordinary.
Fifty-four weeks ago, Eddie Howe took Newcastle to Leicester after finally ending an embarrassingly long wait for a first league win of the season the previous week against Burnley. Any suggestion that momentum may be building was swiftly ended by a 4-0 defeat to a Leicester side who moved within three points of the European spots, the seventh and last of which was at that time held by Spurs.
A thumping, chastening defeat left Newcastle second from bottom, level on points with Norwich and a point ahead of Burnley. Miguel Almiron missed a couple of presentable chances, cementing his reputation as an honest grafter of a footballer but one who sadly couldn’t finish his dinner.
Yeah. It’s been a very long year.
It would be easy to gloss over the impressiveness of this Newcastle win as we all get ourselves reacquainted with the Premier League. Easy to just go “Well, yeah, Newcastle are good now” and remember those catastrophic early weeks of the season when Leicester couldn’t defend at all and seemed to concede five or six every week.
But Leicester had actually turned that round. They’d conceded only once in their last six games before the World Cup, to a Kevin De Bruyne free-kick for Manchester City. They were a team seemingly on the up again.
Within 10 minutes, though, that defensive solidity that had taken so long to acquire had been shattered by a rampant Newcastle. For the visitors, perhaps the most impressive thing was the way a six-week gap made absolutely no difference. They started this game exactly like a team who had won seven of their last eight Premier League games and in absolutely no way like one getting back up to speed following a six-week lay-off.
Newcastle won their penalty that would eventually be converted with emphatic aplomb by Chris Wood after roughly 90 seconds. Which is not a very long time in a football match. And yet even then you found yourself nodding and going “That had been coming.”
By the time Leicester had got anywhere close to the pace of Newcastle’s game, it was already 2-0 as Almiron sauntered through an embarrassingly acquiescent Foxes defence to sidefoot past Danny Ward and inside the far post. Newcastle were…
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