It was an evening when Howe’s big calls paid off following the midweek defeat in Marseille.<\/p>\n
Aaron Ramsdale, Lewis Miley and Anthony Elanga were handed rare starts while regulars like Lewis Hall, Joelinton and Nick Woltemade were also recalled.<\/p>\n
Fabian Schar, Sandro Tonali, Jacob Murphy and Anthony Gordon, who have all been big players for Howe, were among those left on the bench as a result, just a day after the Newcastle head coach insisted he had “no favourites”.<\/p>\n
Rather than the six changes disrupting the side – as such tweaks ultimately did at West Ham earlier this month, when Newcastle looked strangely lethargic – the visitors felt the benefit of rotating.<\/p>\n
It is far from a coincidence that the recent return of Hall and fellow full-back Tino Livramento from injury has given Newcastle a new dimension down the flanks with their energy and creativity.<\/p>\n
Miley, meanwhile, stepped up with a goal and an assist against Everton and this was the rapid Elanga’s best performance since his \u00a355m move from Nottingham Forest last summer.<\/p>\n
Joelinton battled away in the middle of the park, on a night Everton struggled with Newcastle’s physicality, and Woltemade scored a delightful lob to make it 3-0.<\/p>\n
And though Ramsdale had little to do on his first league start, after the under-fire Nick Pope missed out with a groin injury, the goalkeeper brought a calmness in possession and Newcastle used the ball much more effectively, completing 88% of their passes.<\/p>\n
Yet there was a change of mentality as well as personnel.<\/p>\n
Newcastle made an aggressive start – Elanga winning a corner shortly after the kick-off – and Malick Thiaw headed the visitors in front from Miley’s in-swinger.<\/p>\n
It was the quickest Premier League goal of the season, after just 55 seconds, but this was familiar territory for Newcastle.<\/p>\n
They had taken the lead in each of their previous three away games in all competitions only to go on and lose.<\/p>\n
This time, they defended resiliently as Everton probed. <\/p>\n
Dan Burn, back in his favoured position at left-sided centre-back, made a couple of crucial blocks. As did Hall. Even Woltemade got back to cut out a cross from Jack Grealish.<\/p>\n
That did not go unnoticed by Thiaw.<\/p>\n
“We also scored early in other games away or went 1-0 up,” he told Match of the Day. “But, this time, even after we lost a bit of momentum in the game, we all stayed together, defended really well and it paid off.”<\/p>\n
Newcastle have only conceded a measly four goals in the first half of league games this season, which should give Howe’s side a greater platform.<\/p>\n
It certainly did on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was an evening when Howe’s big calls paid off following the midweek defeat in Marseille. Aaron Ramsdale,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":290547,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-290546","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290546","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=290546"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/290546\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/290547"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=290546"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=290546"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=290546"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}