Ketsbaia’s Kick-Off Klub
Done properly, loans can strengthen the first team and quietly keep revenue ticking over. Done badly, they leave players stuck, supporters frustrated, and the club constantly firefighting problems of its own making.
Newcastle United are missing a midfielder whose default setting is aggressive positioning, vertical movement, and end product. Someone who does not wait for space to appear, but creates it by occupying it: Kees Smit.
There was no cathartic release at St James’ Park on Sunday. No early goal to calm the mood. No sense that Newcastle United were about to breeze through the afternoon. Instead, this felt like one of those games that tests a side’s temperament as much as its quality.
There is a particular mood that settles over a season when the calendar tips into January.
Hope is still alive, but it is bruised. The table tells one story, Europe tells another, and the gap between expectation and reality starts to feel either bridgeable or terminal. For Newcastle United supporters in the winter of 2025/26, that feeling is uncomfortably familiar, and oddly encouraging.
Crystal Palace arrive at St James’ Park at a time when United are crying out for back to back league wins. It has only happened once all campaign. That single fact frames this fixture far more than the league table does.
There is something about Christmas football that strips teams back to their essentials. The schedule is relentless, the margins thin, the noise loud. You learn quickly who you are and, just as importantly, who you are not.
There are years that you measure by results, and there are years that you measure by feelings. For Newcastle United, 2025 was both, a ledger of extremes written in ink and emotion. The calendar opened with something that had stopped feeling possible and began to feel mythic: a major domestic trophy. Seventy years since the last one, two generations since the club last placed silver beside the black-and-white, and then, finally, this. The old photographs, the sepia legends, the tales passed down in pubs and living rooms acquired a present tense. It mattered beyond the metal; it gave shape to belief.
Newcastle United head to Turf Moor tonight with both the team and head coach Eddie Howe under serious pressure, largely of their own making.
Last night's 1-0 defeat at Old Trafford should not be filed away as a narrow loss decided by fine margins. It should be understood as confirmation that Eddie Howe has reached the end of his cycle at Newcastle United.
With the festive schedule now in full swing, there felt no better moment to get back into rhythm than a Boxing Day meeting with Manchester United, a fixture that rarely lacks narrative, tension or consequence