Three things we learned as Newcastle lose against Aston Villa

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Newcastle United produced their worst performance of the season to lose 3-0 to Aston Villa on Saturday.

Eddie Howe‘s side had the chance to make it six wins in a row, but Newcastle will instead be looking over their shoulders in the race to qualify for the Champions League.

The defeat opens the door for Manchester United and Tottenham Hotspur, who face Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth respectively this weekend.

After a disappointing display, here are three things we learned from Aston Villa 3 Newcastle 0

Newcastle’s Villa Park woes continue

The Wait for a Newcastle United win at Villa Park goes on. It is now seven games without a win at that stadium. To make matters worse, it is four defeats on the spin.

The last time the Magpies won at Villa Park was September 2013, when goals from Hatem Ben Arfa and Yoan Gouffran gave Alan Pardew’s side a 2-1 victory.

Eddie Howe’s slow starting Magpies

For the third game in a row, Newcastle United have started slowly.

We almost conceded in the opening stages against West Ham before blowing them away, and then we were very poor in the first half at Brentford.

It was a similar pattern at Villa Park, with Unai Emery’s side threatening to blow us away in the opening 45 minutes.

This is something for Howe to address. While it didn’t cost us against West Ham and Brentford, it did today.

First loss to a team not in the ‘big six’ since March 2022

This was just Newcastle’s fourth loss of the season. The other three were against Manchester City and Liverpool, with the latter doing the double over us.

It was a really poor performance against Aston Villa, and marked the first time we have lost a league game to a club outside the traditional ‘big six’ since March 2022.

That was against Everton, when Alex Iwobi’s late goal gave the Toffees a 1-0 win at Goodison Park.