Newcastle Beats Athletic Bilbao: The Match Results and All The Sudden Hype

So, Newcastle remembered how to play soccer again. For a night, anyway. They beat a thoroughly unimpressive `Athletic Bilbao` side with two headers, and now the narrative machine is supposed to spin back up, telling us how they’re back on track for European glory.

Give me a break.

Watching this Newcastle team is like watching a brilliant, erratic artist who can paint a masterpiece one day and then spend the next three days finger-painting on the walls and eating the crayons. Burn and Joelinton use their heads to give Newcastle win over Bilbao wasn’t a sign of a corner turned; it was just another swing of the pendulum. After the pathetic surrender at West Ham, they needed this. After the weekend disaster it was a necessary win. But let's be real, it solves nothing.

This team is frustrating. No, 'frustrating' doesn't even begin to cover it—it's schizophrenic. Eddie Howe can talk all he wants about "good psychology" and "responding mentally," but what does that even mean? It means his team of highly paid, elite athletes decided to show up for a glamourous Champions League night under the lights after completely downing tools for a domestic game they should have been competitive in.

Is that something to be proud of? Or is it a symptom of a deeper, more troubling rot in the team’s character?

The Premier League's Blunt Instrument

The ugly truth of this match is that it wasn’t won with tactical genius. It was won with brute force. The massive advantage Premier League teams have in Europe right now is that they are, for the most part, just bigger and stronger than everyone else. It’s like a varsity football team playing against the chess club. `Liverpool` bludgeoned Real Madrid with set pieces, and Newcastle did the exact same thing to Bilbao.

The first goal was almost comical. Kieran Trippier whips in a free-kick, and Dan Burn—a man so tall he probably needs a special permit to enter most buildings—just materializes at the back post, completely unmarked. Unmarked. How do you lose track of a 6'7" defender in your own box? The `Athletic Bilbao` coach, Ernesto Valverde, basically admitted as much, saying the move was "almost telegraphed." My translation: "We knew exactly what they were going to do, and my guys just stood there and watched it happen."

This is the state of a lot of European competition now. It’s not about the intricate passing you might see from a team like `Barcelona` in its prime; it’s about raw physicality and set-piece execution. Newcastle has that in spades. But is that a sustainable model for success, or just a gimmick that works against smaller, less physical teams? What happens when they can't just bully their opponent off the park? We already know the answer, because we see it every other week.

A Sports Car Built for a Perfect Road

I’ve figured it out. Newcastle is a Bugatti. It’s a marvel of engineering, capable of incredible speed and performance, but only on a perfectly smooth, freshly paved racetrack. That track is St James’ Park on a European night. The atmosphere is electric, the opponent is a little star-struck, and everything just… works.

But the Premier League ain’t a racetrack. It’s a pothole-filled B-road in the middle of nowhere on a rainy Sunday. And the second this Bugatti hits a bump—a physical opponent, a hostile crowd, a moment of adversity—the whole damn thing rattles to pieces. The suspension breaks, the check engine light comes on, and they lose 3-1 to West Ham and look grateful it wasn’t worse.

Howe says, "We want to make sure we don’t become that team that’s yoyoing in terms of attitude and intensity." Too late, Eddie. You are that team. The fact that you, the manager, have to publicly state that you don't want to be that team is the biggest tell of all. It’s an admission that the problem is real and you don’t quite know how to fix it.

They got the job done against `Athletic Bilbao FC`, running down the clock in the second half after Joelinton nodded in another simple goal from a cross. But it felt less like a dominant victory and more like an exercise in energy conservation. They did just enough. And in the process, they lost Anthony Gordon to another injury. Even their wins come at a cost, a constant reminder of how fragile this whole operation is. They can’t even win without something going wrong...

Enjoy It While It Lasts, I Guess

Look, a win is a win, and it puts them in a great position to get out of their Champions League group. The fans will be happy for a few days. But this victory changes nothing about the fundamental, infuriating nature of this club. It’s a temporary dose of dopamine, a papering over of cracks that are starting to look like structural faults. They beat a team from `Bilbao, Spain`, at home. Congratulations. Now they have to go to Brentford. I, for one, am not holding my breath. This Jekyll and Hyde routine is getting old, and I have a feeling we know which personality is showing up next.