Eddie Howe has revealed what he told his Newcastle United players after their defeat to AC Milan last night which saw them knocked out of Europe altogether.
Newcastle were cruelly knocked out of the Champions League last night after some terrific displays of football in the competition, it just wasn’t enough.
Speaking to The Athletic, Howe revealed that, after the game, he encouraged his players to use this defeat as motivation and fuel to succeed in the next match.
Newcastle cannot dwell on the defeat to Milan
In football you rarely get a chance to catch your breath at this level, so these players cannot afford to think too much about what went wrong on Wednesday night.
Instead, they must use these feelings of disappointment and frustration to motivate them for the next game to try and make sure that they don’t feel this way again.
It’s now three defeats in a row across all competitions after also losing to Everton and Tottenham in the last week, making Saturday’s game against Fulham a lot bigger than many would have predicted at the start of the season.
Following the defeat, Howe was keen to remind his players of this and wants them to be as motivated to get a victory over Fulham as they were to beat Milan.
After the game, Howe said: “Football is an amazing thing, isn’t it? You go back 10 days and we’d just beaten Manchester United in our best performance of the season. It’s a challenge for us.
“I said to the players afterwards that ‘this game stops for no one’. We have to park this and adjust, but when you have a setback and you have a disappointment, you have to use it as fuel. The pain you feel now is motivation for tomorrow.”
Howe has to be cautious in the coming weeks
There is no real pressure on Howe at the minute simply because nobody expected Newcastle to qualify through the group of death and they are still performing quite well domestically.
That said, these next two games against Fulham in the league and Chelsea in the Carabao Cup could be a huge turning point in the season.
Two more defeats, making it five in a row, and suddenly Newcastle are drifting closer to mid-table and have been knocked out of what is probably the most winnable tournament for them.
This team, however, have shown time and time again that they are very resilient and have the ability to bounce back after a heart-wrenching defeat like we saw in last year’s cup final defeat to Manchester United.
Howe and his team will be gutted to have lost to Milan, but it’s how Newcastle react afterwards that will define their future.
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