Newcastle United’s Callum Wilson is back amongst the goals for England have calmly slotting home a penalty in their 4-0 win over Malta last night.
The penalty, which was England‘s fourth goal, was Callum Wilson‘s second goal at International level, his last coming when he was a Bournemouth player, scoring against the United States in a 3-0 win back in 2018.
That’s quite a gap between international goals, but Wilson had been out of the England set up for a long time.
Michael Owen was the last player to score for England while at Newcastle
However, Wilson’s personal gap between England goals is nothing compared to Newcastle United‘s. The last Newcastle player to score for England was Michael Owen against Russia in 2007 – almost 16 years ago.
Since then Newcastle have had a couple of representatives in the England squad in the form of Alan Smith, Andy Carroll and Andros Townsend, none of whom scored for England while on the books at Newcastle.
If you haven’t worked it out already, Mike Ashley‘s entire rein of Hell fits into that gap very nicely. Meaning that not once when he had the keys to the Kingdom did a Newcastle player score for England.
Slowly but surely all the Mike Ashley memories are being erased
Now, thanks to Callum Wilson’s superb penalty – which could have been given to Marcus Rashford were it not for Kieran Trippier‘s quick thinking in scooping up the ball and handing it to his Newcastle teammate – another Mike Ashley curse has been lifted.
Slowly but surely, that man’s achievements, or lack thereof, are being scrubbed from the Newcastle record books. The record transfer fee that we had under Ashley has now gone. Our terrible record of going out of every cup competition in the opening stages has now gone (the FA Cup curse still remains, but we’ll work on that).
Literally everything looks better these days. Long may it continue.
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