Newcastle United suffered a pretty bad defeat to Brighton at the weekend and while nobody walked away looking good it was Nick Pope who may be questioning himself the most.
Nick Pope wasn’t called up by Gareth Southgate for the most recent England squad which had Newcastle fans a bit up in arms, but then against Brighton he possibly showed why he’d been overlooked.
It was two Pope errors that led to Evan Ferguson‘s first goal of the game. It started with a poor clearance after the £10million signing from Burnley raced out of the box and kicked the ball up field but only as far as a Brighton player.
Pope had a bad day at the office against Brighton
You could see what Pope was trying to do, but in hindsight he really should have just put the ball out of play. However, one mistake isn’t a problem.
All credit to Pope, he got back on his line to make a fantastic reflex save which was poorly cleared by Sandro Tonali who then failed to close down Billy Gilmour who fired a rasping shot at Pope who, for some inexplicable reason, tried to catch it and fumbled it into the path of Ferguson who fired home.
Seeing the force of Gilmour’s shot Pope should never have been trying to catch that, for the very reason that we saw happen.
Mark Schwarzer thinks Pope may have been distracted
All in all it wasn’t Pope’s best day but now former Middlesbrough and Australia ‘keeper Mark Schwarzer has suggested that something might have been playing on his mind.
The night before the game there’d been talk of Newcastle looking to bring in Tottenham goalkeeper Hugo Lloris. Immediately dismissed as rubbish by fans – after all it was Newcastle that ended his career last season – it was later rubbished by the club too.
However, Schwarzer told Optus Sports in Australia (via NewcastleWorld): “Maybe the talk of Hugo Lloris potentially coming to Newcastle, maybe that was in his head a little bit. It was uncharacteristic of Pope to have a performance like that.”
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