The last few minutes are a kind of perfection. Liverpool score after a video assistant referee delay to make it 2-1. Newcastle restart, pump the ball into the Liverpool corner and from that moment a kind of elemental life force seems to surge through them. This is what you came for. This is how you wanted it, where you wanted it. Remember your training.
Can there be any more forlorn, godforsaken assignment than trying to wrestle Newcastle away from the corner flag in the dying seconds of a Wembley final? Curtis Jones tries and Harvey Elliott tries and Jarell Quansah tries, but these are players desperately unsuited to the task.
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So Newcastle win a throw-in and all of a sudden nobody is around to take it. Sandro Tonali pauses over a corner kick to tie his shoelaces – double knot, maybe triple to be certain? – and accepts his yellow card as if it is a medal. Liverpool, the champions elect of England, have five minutes to find an equalising goal, and don’t manage a single touch in the opposition third.
Really this was the only way it was going to happen: scrapping away over this precious few square yards of turf, eking out these precious few seconds, clinging on to a precious one-goal lead at the end of a competition in which you have had to beat the top four teams in the Premier League. At every juncture Eddie Howe’s team seem to have taken the path of most rather than least resistance, trusting in their ability to dig deeper and uglier and more painfully than you.
“Just a normal game,” Howe had insisted beforehand. Yep, good luck with that. How many normal games are prefaced with a private set from James Bay in the team hotel? How many normal games necessitate the takeover of an entire capital city? Though secreted away in their Hertfordshire hideout, Newcastle’s players will surely have glimpsed the footage from London over the weekend, the thousands of fans converging on Covent Garden, lighting flares and fireworks, draping the Caffè Concerto and the Diptyque scented-candle shop in flags.
While this stuff feels like sideshow, feels like distraction, it is in fact an essential part of the enterprise. One of the basic missions of Newcastle since the Saudi takeover – indeed, a central aim of the takeover itself – has been to project themselves. Make loud noises. Move fast, break things. To adopt the persona and mindset of a Big Club as the first step towards actualising the vision.
You could see it in their early moves in the transfer market, in the recent new stadium plans, in the reimagining of the fanbase as active participant rather than passive observer. One prominent Newcastle podcast was urging travelling fans to take it easy on Saturday night. “Have fun, have a few bevs, but then go home and have that energy for tomorrow,” the host urged. “We need you singing your hearts out. We don’t want to be hungover like two years ago.”
You could see it in the enraptured crowds: everyone either making content or filming it, convinced that they are somehow protagonists at the crux of history. And above all you could see it in the football itself, a thing of cold fury and relentless running, a game built around suffering: the absorption of it, and the infliction of it.
Liverpool, exhausted and distracted, were really no match for any of this. From the earliest minutes there were little cracks appearing in the facade: mix-ups at the back, aimless long passes, the sort of last-ditch blocks and challenges more redolent of a rearguard. Mohamed Salah had 23 touches in 101 minutes. Virgil van Dijk may as well have watched the opening goal from a Club Wembley box. The utterly ineffective Diogo Jota was hauled off before the hour. Meanwhile, Alexander Isak was imperious, Kieran Trippier put in one of the performances of his career, Joelinton stoked and conducted the crowd like an evangelist.
The final whistle blows and the picture begins to blur a little at the edges, so many emotions rushing in at once that the cumulative effect is actually a kind of numbness. Joy, confusion, the drunkenness of discovery and also – let’s be fair – the drunkenness of drunkenness. But also sadness for those no longer here to enjoy it, perhaps even a kind of buried anger. Should it really have taken this long? Should it really have been this hard?
So this was a triumph that felt far more significant than the trophy and the Uefa Conference League place it bestowed. For decades Newcastle’s self-identity has been built on resistance: against entropy, against failure, against hated owners. For decades this is a club who have defined themselves against the footballing establishment. This may just have been the day they joined it.
