Why Eddie Howe is a very different animal | OneFootball

As I recover from the jubilation of three away wins on the bounce at Manchester United, Tottenham and Arsenal, I cannot help but reflect on how fortunate we are to have a manager in Eddie Howe, who never lowers himself to gripe, grumble and make excuses.

Eddie Howe is a very different animal to most Premier League managers.

He proved that when he made the choice to take a break from the game after his Bournemouth departure, so he could embark on his own learning journey.

That is very unusual.

Most football managers are chomping at the bit to have another go and prove themselves but Eddie is not most football managers.

Let us think back to some of his more difficult periods since he arrived on Tyneside.

Our much-publicised injury crisis had an enormous impact on the 2023/24 season and the manager was frequently questioned about it in press conferences and interviews.

But did he grumble? Did he curse his luck and point the finger at his misfortune for causing our loss of form?

Of course not. Instead, he worked with the club to look at what might be causing it, he reflected on whether his own training sessions could be impacting the players’ performances, and he reviewed the art of the possible.

As a result of that, we see a very different Newcastle United this season, still marked by high intensity, but in a much more controlled way than we saw in previous years.

What about when the officials failed Newcastle with one of the most dismal decisions of the VAR era, in awarding a penalty to PSG in the closing stages of our away Champions League tie?

That decision ultimately cost us our place in Europe, as it meant we neither progressed to the second stage of the Champions League, nor the fallback of the Europa League knockouts.

Did we hear Howe castigating the officials? Did we see him losing his rag on the sideline and getting himself a ban?

No, we did not. Acknowledging it was the wrong call was inevitable but Eddie did so with his usual control, balance, respect and good grace. He instead turned his focus away from that poor decision and to our last chance to save the European campaign in our home tie against Milan.

Yet, alas, the manager had the finger pointed at him for falling in that final hurdle. Despite the early lead against the Italians, the team’s supposed inability to hold their own is what did for us.

First we pushed for a second that allowed the equaliser, then we kept on pushing for the winner instead of playing out the draw, as Milan capitalised and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

For most football managers, that would be a glossed-over mishap from the past, the exit blamed ultimately on the decision in Paris. But for Eddie, it was a learning opportunity. He recognised that his own commitment to our style of play was a factor in our failure to get the result to keep our European adventure alive.

Roll on 13 months to a Tuesday night at Arsenal, when the team have taken a surprise two goal lead to put them in a strong position ahead of the second leg, but with a tense 20 minutes or more left on the clock. Seeing the ongoing threat that Gordon, Murphy and Isak had on the break, did Eddie stick to his attacking principles like against Milan and push for another goal that would surely kill the tie off?

No, because he learned from the Milan experience. Anyone unfortunate enough not to be in the packed-out away end but watching at home on telly, will have seen Miguel Almiron arriving on to the field and signalling “five five” to his teammates, not once but twice.

The message from the manager was clear and Miggy was under strict instructions to make sure it was understood and delivered.

It was not a pretty final 20 minutes from the team but it was one of their most professional. They held firm, they created two banks of five that kept openings to a premium, and they did their jobs to perfection.

All the while, the manager watching from the sidelines, with his learning from that night against Milan having sat as a frustration for more than a year, but now displaying itself in the shape of pure defensive and organisational brilliance at the Emirates Stadium.

Now this is a very positive piece about Eddie Howe, so perhaps it would undermine it to start having a pop at some of his peers, but have a pop I shall.

Can you just imagine the Newcastle manager spewing some of the garbage that came from Ange Postecoglou’s mouth in the aftermath of our 2-1 victory at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium?

It just would not happen. There were of course the inaccuracies in the Australian’s views – disputing a Joelinton intervention that every ex-official and 90 per cent of pundits agree was not a handball based on the laws of the game, and ignoring the fact we could have been 4-1 up at the interval before our second half defensive masterclass.

Yet worse than that was Postecoglou’s sulking, stubborn demeanour before the media, like a petulant toddler who thinks it isn’t fair that there is no chocolate dessert until at least half the fish fingers have been eaten. It was an embarrassment and Eddie Howe would never venture so low.

And what about Mikel Arteta?

Surprisingly there was no referee’s decisions to point to on this occasion, while the lack of physios on the pitch meant the usual cheap jibe about Newcastle’s timewasting was another avenue he could not venture down.

So instead it was the ball.

The apparent penny floater from the beachside shops at Whitley Bay, which they have been deploying in the League Cup this season, and which prevented Arsenal from turning possession into goals.

Thank goodness Newcastle were playing with a normal ball that allowed Alexander Isak and Anthony Gordon to bury their chances, rather than the one Arsenal’s players had to use. Oh, hold on a minute…

Like Postecoglou, Arteta is an embarrassment, and like his rival from the other side of North London, he will never improve as a manager as he seemingly does not possess the capacity to reflect and to learn.

If something is never your fault, you will not have any lessons to take from it, right? But if you are able to accept maybe sometimes you could have done things differently, then you add that learning to your artillery and you become better.

That is Eddie Howe’s guiding principle. That is why he took his voluntary sabbatical from football, that is why players invariably improve under his guidance and that is why his humility and composure in an era of increasingly over-passionate big-ego managers is so welcome.

It is also why the naysayers who called for his head when we stumbled earlier this season were wrong (and – by the way – I think the vocal tiny minority were keyboard warriors rather than regular matchgoing true supporters. I never heard a seriously bad word said against him at home or away games).

So when we do go through dark spells in the future (which we will), the one thing we can be absolutely certain of is that as long as Eddie Howe is the manager at the helm, he will learn and improve from it and will come back stronger and better.

That is a rare quality we should all hope we can hold on to for as long as we possibly can.