Chizzletooth

Think some people are so scarred from the Ashley era that the concept of a "Squad" has been lost. Some of your non favourite players will be hanging around for a few windows yet, best make peace with it.

Looking forward to seeing him again v West Ham. Another solid performance and he'll be a long way to dispelling "the southern Dummet" and "no better than what we have" jibes he was getting from folk who'd never seen him play.

The idea with Botman and Carlos was to have one ball playing defender and one warrior. Schar/Lascelles are like the super low budget version of that. This idea that Schar is miles better than Lascelles isn't really borne out, in fact his superior technical ability often gets him into trouble as seen by his horrendous rick against Man United which should have lost us the game. He was good against Leeds, but has only ever really worked in a three with protection around him. Burn feels like the Schar replacement, I reckon Eddie will stick with Lascelles, limited as he is, for now.

Yeah but we're not Villa. We're in a desperate situation with tonnes of money and dealing with really difficult sellers and agents using us to jack up the price/flush out other interest continually.

Broja has strong potential from what I've seen. Technique, finishing, poise. And for those who don't watch much football outside of Newcastle, you could do worse than checking out the weekly PL highlights on a popular streaming site every week, we are going to be linked with a lot of players from now on.

Aiming for at least 7, so ideally 9 points from 3 teams superior to us, 1 vastly so. And people wonder why we're called deluded. 4 points was the best we could have ever hoped for, given personnel, confidence and form.

Or, to give the guy a break, he has a source in the consortium who doesn’t fancy Fonseca, but other parties within it might. We’re regularly told that there are various people with inputs with PIF getting sign off.

It’s a good point. People expecting us to go out and beat a superior (to us) Palace side are living in a bit of a dreamworld. Gallagher alone is light years ahead of anything we have. As has been mentioned, the players are totally devoid of confidence. There’s so much work to do. If we could somehow fluke another point next week the new man will come into a reasonable situation.

The lockdown and the takeover is clearly affecting people’s mental health. Newcastle United do not turn down a trophy under any circumstances. Ever.

You laugh but let's wait and see. I bet I'm proven right in time If you genuinely can’t even Picture it happening, you’re a deeply unimaginative man.

Another day, another letter. Can’t see how the PL could grant the meeting, surely that would be setting a precedent they could never come back from.

It’s probably the still-fresh fury talking, but I don’t give a monkeys who the new manager is, be it a “credible” manager or a no mark “coach” if they agree to terms that makes them an Ashley shill, and they should be made to feel unwelcome from the moment they arrive. If we have to make the club unmanageable in the short term than so be it. The fat man must go, by any means necessary.

Loving the “so called fit and proper test” line. I mean everyone knows the bar is so low on that it’s practically on the floor. Perhaps also a not so veiled dig at all the journos treating them as a bit of a joke.

How is an absolute no mark like snodgrass causing so much trouble?

His first answer lasts almost 13 minutes, a jumbled torrent of words that reflect just how much Isaac Hayden needs to talk, to explain. The question was not exactly Jeremy Paxman, not quite David Frost or Jonathan Dimbleby, but the gentlest of dollies about whether the Newcastle United midfield player is enjoying his football. Enjoyment, it turns out, is not a straightforward concept. In Hayden’s existence, nothing is. Hayden is playing for “a huge club with fantastic fans,” but satisfaction is tempered. This is “not a place you’d willingly give up,” he says, but it is what he tried to do, pushing to leave Newcastle last summer and again in January, driven to sacrifice something for his family, which is not the way football usually works. And yet his story at St James’ Park is not done. The curtain has risen on a second act. Hayden, 23, has a one-year old daughter who has changed his outlook on lifeHayden, 23, has a one-year old daughter who has changed his outlook on life IAN HORROCKS FOR THE TIMES There he was on Tuesday, excelling in a 2-0 victory over Burnley, saluting the crowd afterwards, one of the last to step from the field. And here he is now, picking through his dilemma. If 2018 was the most traumatic year of his life and career, then 2019 has begun very differently, with ten consecutive league appearances for Rafa Benítez’s team. When you think about it — and Hayden does, often — it is all pretty strange. Hayden arrived on Tyneside in the summer of 2016, when Newcastle were preparing for the Sky Bet Championship. An Essex boy, he joined from Arsenal on a five-year contract. “I was single and I had a ‘world is my oyster’ mentality,” he says. He found a city which craved connection. “People want you to relate to their club, to understand it, maybe to fall in love with it,” he says. “I’ve done those things.” Hayden is still only 23, but there are others to love now; Lauren, his fiancé, and Adriana, their one-year-old daughter. Fatherhood has “massively” changed the way he looks at things. “As a player, you do what’s best for the team, but I’m a human being, too, and sometimes you have to do what’s best for your individual circumstances,” he says. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who hides away from saying that, who isn’t honest.” Truth pours from him. At Newcastle’s training ground, Hayden is described as a nice lad, smart and quiet, but having tried to protect his family, he now wants supporters to understand. To do that takes detail. “My daughter’s birth and everything leading up to it was very traumatic; not many people know what it was really like,” he says. “My fiancé was very, very ill for the whole term of her pregnancy, the whole 9 months. “She was bed-ridden, couldn’t do anything. She was being sick 20-30 times a day. She had hyperemesis gravidarum, the condition that Kate Middleton had. She was going into hospital to be put on drips. She was in Newcastle at that point, but her family is based in the south west, mine’s in Essex and she really had no support. I remember we played Stoke [City] at home and I was at hospital with her at 5am and then played after three hours sleep. It was carnage. “When Adriana was born in December 2017, she was six weeks premature and then she was in neonatal care. She had ongoing problems with her breathing and temperature control. She was in the Portland Hospital in London. While all that was happening, trying to play football was difficult. She’s doing okay now, but there’re still a lot of things, little checks and stuff, and we like to use the same hospital for her specific needs. Hayden excelled in thre 2-0 victory over Burnley on Tuesday night Hayden excelled in thre 2-0 victory over Burnley on Tuesday night SCOTT HEPPELL/REUTERS “They come and see me quite regularly, but I want to be in a place for my daughter to settle down and have a happy home environment and not be moving around too much. Lauren has done an awful lot for me and given up a lot to have a child, especially in the situation we did. Looking back, I don’t know how she did it. She deserves to be in a position where she’s happy, where’s she’s closer to her family and closer to the hospital.” Because of the skewed way we look at football, some might not accept this logic. Hayden can afford it; buy help, get a nanny. “We tried, but it’s not something we want to do,” he says. So suck it up; he can afford discomfort, too. “People will say, ‘you earn thousands of pounds a week, you’re an hour’s flight away from your child, what’s the problem’, but the whole point of being a dad is to be there,” he says. “When she’s older, I don’t want her to say ‘dad paid for everything, but I only saw him once every three weeks’. I want her to say ‘I did this with daddy, we went there together’. Money isn’t everything. It’s about the time you spend with children, the effort you put in. I want to know her. I don’t want to miss her walking for the first time, talking, all those things. I want to be a proper dad.” In July, Brighton & Hove Albion tried to sign him. It made sense. “It’s frustrating; when people saw Brighton were interested, they assumed I must want more money,” Hayden says. “No. I would have taken a pay cut. It was exactly the same in January. The manager knows that. Everyone at the club knows my situation, my character.” There was empathy from Benítez, from Lee Charnley, Newcastle’s managing director, but the club’s attempts to find a replacement fell through. Pre-season had been a write-off and then Hayden found himself stuck and out of the squad, “a double whammy,” as he puts it. When he was needed at Cardiff City in August, his head was scrambled. His appearance as a half-time substitute was calamitous. “It was a whirlwind,” he says. “I didn’t go on purposefully thinking about getting sent off, that wouldn’t cross my mind, but Josh Murphy was causing us problems, taking players on, skinning players and I thought ‘well, he needs to get whacked’. I couldn’t let him take the piss, but my challenge was too firm, the wrong type of tackle and I knew the red card was coming. “I sat in the dressing-room on my own. I knew what I’d done was wrong, that I was going to get stick. After coming out publicly saying I wanted a transfer to getting sent off, I was at the lowest of lows. It reflected where I was mentally. It just highlighted everything I was feeling, compounding the misery. “When I look back on it now, 2018 as a whole was just terrible. Professionally, I only started two games, I got the first red card of my career and personally, it was difficult as well. I made some mistakes. It was a very stressful period. I hope I’ve improved as a man and as a father since then.” Hayden, from Essex, came through the Arsenal academy Hayden, from Essex, came through the Arsenal academy DAVID PRICE/GETTY IMAGES Lauren, 28, was there for him. “It was some year, but she’s been so supportive,” Hayden says. “She’s done so much for me, especially in terms of the mentality thing. When I was at my lowest she told me to keep my head screwed on, to keep working hard. She’s done more than anybody can ever know.” It has given him perspective. “I wouldn’t say my life has been on hold because you can always find little solutions to improve things, but limbo is the word,” Hayden says. “You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. You’re always in that strange place. I don’t blame the club. They had to do what’s best for them and I completely respect that. You have to respect the fans most of all. When you’re contracted to do a job, you fulfil your duties.” In the meantime, Hayden has found prominence again. Injuries and international call-ups cleared space in Newcastle’s midfield and he has filled it, less newsworthy, perhaps, than Sean Longstaff beside him, but just as impressive and, in a way, more startling. “The manager said to me, ‘you’re good enough to play here, there’s no pecking order, you have a clean slate’,” Hayden says. “He’s been really good with me.” Hayden has been good in return. He is solid, professional, aware of his surroundings. “It’s not like I’ve downed tools,” he says. “I would never do that. I get where people are coming from. They’re Newcastle through and through and if a player comes out and says ‘I want to leave’ for whatever reason, they’re always going to have that angst. But it’s never been the case that I don’t like the club, the city or the fans. I do. It’s nothing to do with that. “This is a huge club. It’s also a frustrating club, because it’s got the infrastructure to be in the Champions League, 52,000 fans at every home game, all the away ends packed out wherever we go, it’s a one-club city. It’s got all the makings to be enormous but for whatever reasons it’s not reaching its potential. It’s not the kind of club you’d want to leave.” The irony of that is not lost on Hayden, a sportsman living a privileged life but still just a person, with the same concerns that each of us have about family and love and guilt and responsibility. A man being pulled in different directions. “You have all these questions in your head,” he says, “but until the summer, that’s it. It’s head down, full focus, doing everything I can to help Newcastle. And I know I can do more. It’s not finished.” In spite of it all, here Hayden is, reborn and reenergised when he least expected it. Here he is, thriving in the Premier League, soaking up applause. “Here I am,” he repeats. “Yeah, exactly.” A smile flickers on his lips. And after all those words, after all that explanation and to return to where we started, is he enjoying his football? Can he? Hayden reconsiders and, this time, his answer is brief. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”