Could have been better, has been much worse. Newcastle United picked up a draw and got the hell out of Dodge. Molineux is not a treasured venue — long journey, shallow away end, 11 years since a Premier League win there, nightmare memories — but at least it no longer feels like the scene of a wake. Two years on from the lowest point in their modern history, it was just another game; tick it off and move on.
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There were moments when Eddie Howe’s team looked shattered, unsurprising given the injuries which are now biting — the head coach named a substitutes’ bench full of full-backs and goalkeepers — the emotional energy expended against Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League, the draining saga of Sandro Tonali’s suspension. With this as context, the head coach declared that his glass of optimism was “definitely half full”.
Twice ahead through Callum Wilson, twice pegged back, they surfed their own luck — Gary O’Neill described Newcastle’s second goal, a penalty, as “a scandalous decision” — defied leaden legs to finish with some purpose and extended their unbeaten run to six league matches. It was a decent enough result in sopping, saturating weather if not a great one. “An impressive end,” Howe said.
Among the 3,000 travelling supporters, spread along the length of the Steve Bull Stand, there was applause, frustration and a discordant choir of greatest hits: “Eddie Howe’s black and army,” and “EI, EI, EI-OOOOOOO,” and “Who’s that team we call United”. If a true, full bookending for the old Newcastle remains elusive, then there was satisfaction in the mundane. Mundane means a trip down the A1 after a European tie. Mundane means sixth in the table.
It is not an away end that encourages fervour. A long seam of people, with Wolves fans in the tier above, it makes noise a strange concept, with chants and goal celebrations taking an aeon to ripple through and around. Boisterousness or outrage came and went and sometimes did not meet in the middle, but the mood remained buoyant and how could it not in this era of expansion? And when mundane at Molineux used to mean a slow expiration?
“In a perverse way, it’s a memory I’ll cherish,” Thomas Concannon of Wor Flags, the fans’ group, says. “It was a terrible, terrible game and a terrible, terrible time, but every generation has a day like that where you can look back and say ‘God, we were bad’, or ‘God, that was s****’, but I was there — I was there at the lowest point’.”
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For Newcastle fans, that day was October 2, 2021, and a 2-1 defeat at Molineux. There were two goals for Hwang Hee-chan, sandwiching a futile equaliser from Jeff Hendrick, bad enough to leave the club second-bottom of the Premier League with the second-worst goal difference. They were still to win a match that season in any competition.
Newcastle were the ultimate limbo club. After the match, Steve Bruce spoke about “getting the balance right,” echoing comments he had uttered 12 months earlier after a 1-1 draw at Wolves, when he said, “We are trying to find a balance.” In late August 2021, when his team traipsed from the Carabao Cup at home to Burnley on penalties, the head coach expressed pleasure at keeping a clean sheet. “OK, we’ve gone out of the cup, but we didn’t lose,” he said.
Wolves, though, was the nadir, not because the performance was particularly harrowing but because it felt like an existential ending. The away section was flat in every respect. If a club is defined as a collection of people brought together for a common cause, Newcastle United utterly contradicted it: people being forced apart with no common cause at all. The prospect of a takeover felt distant. Hope had retreated and retracted.
“Me and the lads travelled to the game by car, as we normally do unless it’s a London game and it was an absolute chore,” Concannon says. “Nobody could be arsed. We’d repeatedly been belittled by the ownership and the management and we were terrible on the pitch, with nothing to cheer about.
“Wolves is never high on people’s lists because it’s a difficult place to make an atmosphere because of how spread out the away end is and we haven’t got the best record there, either. We’re talking now about demand for tickets… You could barely give them away that day. There were so many spares knocking about, it was crazy. Nobody wanted to be there. There was barely any support for the team, arguments were rumbling on…”
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Driving home would usually be a time for dissection, for a whinge and moan and then the passengers would crack open a few beers and it’s back to the laughing and p***-takes. “Those kind of journeys were part and parcel of being a Newcastle fan,” Concannon says. “But one of the lads, who is normally quite sprightly, just said, ‘We’re f*****… We’re f*****’.
“He didn’t just mean in terms of getting relegated, because we’d done that before and ended up quite enjoying it, because we’d win and the manager and squad in those seasons were good, but this time around absolutely not. He was talking about the club. As a whole, we were absolutely screwed. We had nothing. There are disastrous stories in football where clubs have been destroyed by their owners but we just had no life left at all.”
A few days later, Newcastle’s world was transformed beyond recognition: new owners, new ambitions, new hope. Life. Two years on, Wor Flags have turned St James’ Park into a riot of noise and hostility. Driving home, they dissect the Champions League, their hopes of winning something. They are still in the League Cup.
“Because of that Wolves game, I’ll forever be grateful when times are good like this,” Concannon says. “Hopefully, we never have that again.”
Molineux is gone for another season and memories are already fading.
(Top photo: Matt McNulty/Getty Images)