Newcastle and Leeds played out one of the most entertaining games of the season so far, but at times you didn’t know whether you were watching a football game or a basketball match.
Any team under the tutelage of Marcelo Bielsa is going to show attacking intent, but Steve Bruce seemed to get sucked into the Argentine’s gung-ho approach.
It made for great viewing, but there was little in the way of formations or tactics. It was just a case of ‘you attack, we attack, and let’s see who scores more goals’.
Newcastle are neither putting teams to the sword or producing rear-guard displays. It seems at the moment that we’re getting caught up thinking we can do a little bit of both, and that’s where Bruce needs to step up and coach this team.
This team isn’t good enough at going toe-to-toe week in, week out with the majority of the sides in the Premier League.
No one gets remembered being relegated as the great entertainers. The best chance of survival this season is setting up with a pragmatic approach, which still allows our flair players to go and influence the game on the counter-attack.
If Leeds had been more clinical and converted more of their nine shots on target then there would have been absolute anarchy inside St. James’ Park.
But Bruce got lucky on this occasion. In some sense it’s admirable to let the shackles off his players and give them the freedom to play, but leaving his backline effectively playing one-v-one versus the likes of Rodrigo, Daniel James, Raphinha and Patrick Bamford seems a little more naïve than it does brave.
If Bruce adopts that approach over the next two games away at Watford and Wolves, who have two players in Ismaïla Sarr and Adama Traore that can take the game away from you in a second, then his team could find themselves on the end of a big hiding.
Receive a digest of our best Newcastle content each week direct to your mailbox
