The unlikeliest of tactical chameleons: how Howe is holding Newcastle together

Manager once regarded as a purist unsettled Liverpool with his team's direct style amid the Isak transfer saga

- Louise Taylor

Yasir al-Rumayyan will not have to step very far from the front door of his magnificent Riyadh villa to encounter a chameleon. The kaleidoscopically coated members of the lizard family can be found almost everywhere across the Arabian peninsula and the wider Middle East, but Newcastle's chair probably did not expect to meet one at St James' Park on Monday night. Given Eddie Howe's preference for wearing the same black club tracksuit at almost every opportunity, he initially seems an unlikely northern European offshoot of the species. Yet, in responding to a series of setbacks by, sometimes quite radically, adjusting his tactical colours, Newcastle's manager has proved himself the cleverest of chameleons.

In the absence of their striking striker, Alexander Isak, Newcastle have taken one point from two games, at Aston Villa and at home to Liverpool, but those stumbles were much more about bad luck than Howe's judgment.

It is not the manager's fault that Isak's enduring desperation to force a move to Anfield is understood to have left him resistant to an olive branch extended by Newcastle on Monday afternoon.

Much as the T-shirts and hats on sale outside St James' Park bearing the message "Isak is a rat" emphasised that the love affair between the Swede and Newcastle fans seems all but over, so too is Howe's time as a football romantic.