This could have been a night where Newcastle took a huge step towards qualifying for the last 16.<\/p>\n
Indeed, at one point, Newcastle had moved above Inter Milan, Real Madrid, Liverpool and Atletico Madrid into sixth place in the live standings after coming from behind to lead in Germany.<\/p>\n
But this was an occasion where some familiar issues reared their head.<\/p>\n
Firstly, Newcastle were easily undone from another corner kick for Leverkusen’s opener.<\/p>\n
Andrich easily wriggled away from Sandro Tonali to get his head on Aleix Garcia’s delivery and the ball hit the back of Guimaraes and bounced into the net.<\/p>\n
It came just a week after Spurs captain Cristian Romero had all the time he needed to score an overhead kick from a similar situation and four days after Newcastle conceded a penalty against Burnley after midfielder Jacob Ramsey handled the ball from a corner.<\/p>\n
But Newcastle showed immense spirit to recover in the second half, typified by the livewire Gordon, who looks back to his best.<\/p>\n
In fact, the England forward has already matched the legendary Alan Shearer’s club record for the most goals and assists (seven) in a single Champions League campaign after also setting up Miley’s second.<\/p>\n
But, once again, a late concession proved costly – just as it did against Spurs and, nearly did, following a nervy finish against 10-man Burnley.<\/p>\n
If Newcastle are to emerge from Sunday’s Wear-Tyne derby against Sunderland unscathed, they not only have to swiftly lift themselves following this latest sucker punch.<\/p>\n
They have to quickly eradicate these troublesome trends from their game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This could have been a night where Newcastle took a huge step towards qualifying for the last 16.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185834,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-185833","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185833","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185833"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185833\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185834"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185833"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185833"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185833"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}