Once again, Eddie Howe can be bracketed alongside two of Tyneside's favourite faces. This time, however, it is in less enviable fashion. Sir Bobby Robson and Kevin Keegan left Newcastle suddenly in late summers, decisions seemingly taken at the wrong time plunging them into transition and trouble. At least, unlike a couple of distinguished predecessors, Howe has gone before a season has started and not after a few games.
But it is less than four weeks before it begins, following a 4-1 friendly defeat to Bristol City, when it seems the team Howe built is falling apart. Howe was a transformative and a terrific Newcastle manager, but the danger is his five-year reign comes to be the anomaly in their recent history, a period of achievement surrounded by the underachievement.
Howe did something even Robson and Keegan could not and took a trophy to Tyneside: Newcastle's first since 1969, their first in English football in seven decades. Go back 17 months, to the day they won the Carabao Cup, and Howe was asked about getting his own statue at St James' Park. With characteristic modesty, he deflected the questions. Was he, he was asked, a legend? "We don't put ourselves in that bracket," he said. "We will let other people decide that when we are long gone."
Eddie Howe ended Newcastle's 70-year wait for a domestic trophy.... (Getty)
...but leaves with his squad falling apart (PA)

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