How Eddie Howe has kept Newcastle’s record-equalling winning streak going: Humility, calmness, focus

The victories keep piling up for Newcastle United and, wouldn’t you know it, Eddie Howe is talking about “the dangers of winning games” and “the warning signs” that flicker at the edge of his vision.

It is perfect Howe. Peak Howe. While everybody else revels in a heady, joyous ride, he is fiddling with the seatbelt, checking and double-checking, a meticulous, detail-obsessed head coach who readily admits he is motivated by “the fear of tomorrow”. One day, that safety harness will be needed, but not now. Not yet.

How Newcastle have turned their season around has been covered elsewhere, but it boils down to one big tactical change in moving Sandro Tonali into a defensive midfield position and a host of smaller tweaks; individual meetings with players in the aftermath of that deflating 4-2 defeat at Brentford on December 7, reminders about attitude, waiting for the turbulence of summer and autumn to settle.

How they have kept — and keep — the run going is something else.

As Anthony Gordon put in the aftermath of Newcastle’s 2-0 victory over Arsenal in the first leg of their Carabao Cup semi-final, which was consecutive win number seven of nine in all competitions, “When we’re humble and when we’re a unit and it’s a team, that’s when we’re at our best. When we don’t and we play as individuals, we’re not a very good team. The recipe is there for us.”

“Not a very good team” is a brutal assessment, but the logic is accurate. In Gordon, Tonali, Alexander Isak, Bruno Guimaraes and others, Newcastle have a cadre of fabulous players, but if this strange season has reiterated anything it concerns the power of the collective. If one dips, they all dip, something Alan Shearer pointed out in The Athletic post-Brentford, when he talked about the team pressing “in ones or twos”, and “a problem of mentality”.

Howe’s one-on-ones with his entire first-team squad was pivotal in Newcastle’s reset. He encouraged players to speak their minds and list their concerns, but then emphasised some basic truths. The season was in the balance and would fork in one of two directions. Perhaps their reputations — his included — would do likewise. For lots of reasons, it had been a bruising summer and autumn, but they had to get a grip.

Most basic of all, they had to get a win and follow it up with another. After Brentford, when Newcastle were 12th in the table, they had won twice in 11 Premier League matches. Every manager needs positive results to reinforce their methods, to give players buy-in and although Howe felt his side were not too far away, results offered a counter-argument. When confidence suffers, performances follow, doubts fester, pressure mounts.

It is something Howe has said repeatedly in public, during good times and bad: “Winning shapes everything”.

“Confidence is the first thing for building the castle — this is the base for us,” Tonali said in the match programme for the Wolverhampton Wanderers game this week. One win was a brick, the second cement. The castle — Newcastle — now stands tall.

After Arsenal, Howe spoke about what it is like to manage a team which is winning game after game. “You still encounter problems,” he said. “Not everything is rosy and there are still challenges, but there’s just a different feeling and you’re doing everything, including encountering those issues, in a positive frame of mind.

“The players are certainly positive and they believe in each other and winning is the only thing that really, truly glues them together in that way. So the challenge for us is to try and harness that and keep it and not throw it away, because sometimes that can be easily done. We don’t take it for granted.”

The turnaround began against Leicester City (George Wood/Getty Images)

Gordon’s message about humility is at the heart of Newcastle’s winning sequence, which will become a club record of 10 in all competitions if they prevail against Bournemouth this weekend. After their 3-0 victory over Wolves — win number nine — The Athletic asked central defender Sven Botman how they go about protecting it.

“We have to stay humble, keep our heads calm and don’t get too much in a celebration mood,” he said. “The next game is in three days so we have to stay calm, keep the basics and do the right things and just keep focusing on winning games.”

Howe agreed. “We’re going to have to improve and that’s going to be my message to the players,” he said. “We have to be hard on ourselves in this successful moment for our future success.”

“Stay humble” is Newcastle’s training ground mantra.

But what does all this mean in practice? “We haven’t done anything radically different,” he told reporters this week. “People naturally assume after the Brentford game I ripped the walls off and then players have responded, and nothing could be further from the truth. You have your beliefs and your principles and your style of play and then you’re just always moulding and tweaking and changing to try and find a winning formula.”

And when you find the formula, you mould and tweak and change it, just to keep things fresh.

Kieran Trippier, part of Newcastle’s “leadership group”, made a similar point in his programme notes this week. “We haven’t really deviated too much from what we were doing earlier in the campaign,” he wrote. “We remained focused and positive and stuck together, which is so crucial and something I’ve been big on since I arrived at the club. Once a team starts getting that rhythm back, you start seeing the best of individuals… and when they’re on fire, the team just clicks.”

Kieran Trippier (front left) highlighted focus and positivity (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

It helps that Howe is so clear-eyed. He is not unpredictable nor prone to mood-swings. It is easy to be swept away at Newcastle. Kevin Keegan, one of his predecessors, likened managing the club to riding a “black-and-white tiger”, while Sir Bobby Robson, formerly of England and Barcelona, huge, unwieldy, unforgiving jobs, always said the highs at Newcastle were higher and the lows lower. It is still an emotional club.

“One of my strongest abilities is to stay level,” Howe said this week. “Whether that’s boring or not is for other people to decide but keeping that stability in all phases — wins, losses, draws, success, perceived failure — is important in this role because I don’t think your players want to see you… there’s a time to be emotional, but not overly emotional continuously. That can be draining. I like to be there for my players on an emotional level on a daily basis, but extreme reactions will never help.”

Howe’s calmness has set the tone; it is consistent. In terms of match preparation, training, analysis, the same applies. Howe has a compulsion to watch games back immediately after their conclusion and this has not changed. If there are clips to pull out either to praise his players or to highlight something that needs work, then he will do it, but there is a relentless focus on the next game. Past results are barely, if ever, mentioned.

In this respect, Howe is deeply superstitious. Not in the sense of wearing lucky socks or carrying a rabbit’s foot, but in the sense of minimising disruption. When he talked about “problems” and “challenges” at Arsenal, it was shortly after Martin Dubravka had appeared to wave a tearful farewell to supporters, but a mooted transfer to Saudi Arabia’s Al Shabab no longer made sense and has now been shelved. Dressing-rooms are delicate and upheaval might have been self-defeating.

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Dubravka has been ever-present in Newcastle’s nine wins and eight other players have started at least seven of them. Before the Bromley game in the FA Cup, when Howe made nine changes to his first XI, regular starters were given some extra time off, his dilemma being to ensure there was little to no impact on his plans for Wolves.

“Eddie has kept things the same for players during this good run,” someone close to Howe says, speaking anonymously to protect relationships. “He knows it will end at some point, but we’ve come so far it makes sense to carry on. He’s the same, win or lose. He’s always pushing the group, worrying about them dropping off when they’re winning or about a lack of confidence when they’re not. He’s always thinking about finding the right things to say at the right time.”

As Howe says himself, “I don’t think it was totally broken then (after Brentford) and I don’t think it’s totally fixed now. There’s always growth in the team.”

Newcastle kept the streak going against Bromley in the FA Cup (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

Earlier this season, Newcastle beat Chelsea and Arsenal (in the Carabao Cup and Premier League respectively) and drew 3-3 with Liverpool, a brilliant match. They have lost at home against West Ham and at Brentford and at Fulham, huge swings in consistency, which led Shearer to write “big players do not just turn up for big games. The best players find a way of turning up every week, whoever the opposition, treating them the same”.

This has also been addressed. “One of the most impressive things about this sequence of wins is that, yes, we’ve had different competitions but you have’t seen a change of focus, you haven’t seen a lowering of motivation levels for certain games,” Howe said. “We’ve gone from the Carabao Cup to the Premier League to the FA Cup and I’ve seen the same attention to the small details that matter. That’s a big compliment to the players.”

So what of Howe’s mild paranoia, the dangers of winning and that “fear of tomorrow”? What does all that look like?

“I think the warning signs for us will be a lack of focus,” he said. “That really first appears on the training ground. It’s about making sure the players are absolutely ready and absorbing the information we give them, preparing in the right way and not lowering standards. I haven’t seen any of that. They’ve been very professional during this period, but it’s really important we don’t drop.

“You’ve got to guard against those things, but I try to take every day on its own merits; I don’t pre-judge the attitude of the players, I’ll see it face-to-face and react accordingly. The attitude and the desire and the motivation to win games has been really high and that’s the biggest thing that can’t fall.

“The players see the bigger picture. We know how tight the league is and we know that everything is there for us to play for. That ambition has got to be in the team all the time.”

One day, Newcastle will not win. That ambition and attitude should ensure they bounce back.

(Top photo: Eddie Howe by Naomi Baker via Getty Images)