Daylight Savings has been a real pain in the ass. I don’t like it being dark by 6pm and I don’t care if it’s light in the morning – I’m not awake then.
It has had, however, one benefit; the Premier League’s lunchtime kickoff is now at 11:30pm NZT, rather than 1:30am (the two-hour change is due to the fact that the Poms changed their clocks too). That does mean, of course, that games that kicked off at nine in the morning here are now at 7am, but them’s the breaks.
Anyway, yesterday’s lunchtime kickoff was Newcastle vs West Ham. I watched this because
a) it looked decent.
b) I, as a Liverpool supporter, had a stake in it – Liverpool and West Ham are competing for a top four spot.
c) I really had nothing else to do.
And what a game it was.
The first half was a story of West Ham errors, as they put in a performance that harked back to the days of, well, pretty much the entirety of the last decade before this season.
The first goal in particular was just a comedy of errors. Craig Dawson lost the ball to Joelinton with a trampoline-esque touch – and then stupidly and ineffectively hacked the striker down, an action for which he would receive a second yellow card. Before the referee got around to producing Dawson’s second yellow, though, he played advantage. Allan Saint-Maximin ran at and completely outstripped Mark Noble, then scuffed a shot which would have been easily saved by Lukasz Fabianski – but for the intervention of Issa Diop. The defender took a swing at the ball, missed it, and then swept it into him own new with his other foot. Plonker.
Newcastle’s second goal was more straightforward, but no less calamitous, as Fabianski charitably dropped a cross straight to Joelinton for the oafish striker to tap home. Even he couldn’t miss from there.
And so Newcastle went in at the break two goals and a man to the good. Game over? Of course not. It’s Newcastle.
For their next trick, Newcastle decided to make their extra player disappear – or so it appeared. They sat on the edge of their own box and allowed West Ham’s ten men to completely dictate the game, enabling the Hammers to pull a goal back through an Issa Diop header and then draw level with the Jesse Lingard penalty. Newcastle, in short, looked to have thrown the game down the toilet. Typical of them.
But the show was now yet over.
That show was not over because Newcastle are a really weird team. Having had West Ham on the ropes in the first half they had come out and been completely passive. Now that they were under the cosh they went on the attack again. And with eighty-two minutes on the clock Joe Willock ghosted into the box, got the jump on Ben Johnson, and powered home a header. Fabianski got something on it, the bar got something on it, but it would not be stopped. Get in lad.
So, yeah. Newcastle utterly baffle me. They’re nine points clear of the relegation zone though, they must be doing something right.
