Full Time
Newcastle and Liverpool shared the points in a 1-1 draw at St James' Park, with Yoane Wissa giving the home side the lead just before half-time. The story of the day, though, was Alexander Isak scoring against his former club with 13 minutes left, on his first appearance back on Tyneside since his big-money move to Liverpool over the summer. He didn't exactly celebrate wildly, for what it's worth. A point each to start the season, though Newcastle fans will have decidedly mixed feelings about how it arrived.
Pre-match Talking Points
Match talking points will appear here before kick-off.
Team Talking Points
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1Eddie Howe's near five-year reign ended abruptly in July, when he stepped down less than 24 hours after a pre-season friendly defeat to Championship side Bristol City. Nobody saw it coming — Howe had just delivered Newcastle's first major trophy in decades the season before, so the timing floored fans as much as it did the club.
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2German coach Matthias Jaissle arrived from Al Ahli to replace him and has started unbeaten: Newcastle came from two goals down to draw 2-2 at Bournemouth, then won 2-0 away at Tottenham.
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3Anthony Elanga swapped Nottingham Forest for Newcastle in a £55m summer deal, and Yoane Wissa arrived too — between them they scored both goals in that win over Spurs, and Wissa's already being called 'Newcastle's best signing' by people inside the club.
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4Elanga did have a scare in pre-season, stretchered off after a bad tackle in a friendly at Valencia. It turned out to be a dead leg and bruising rather than anything serious, and he was fit for the season opener.
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5The Jaissle era has gone smoother than the sudden managerial change suggested it might — an unbeaten start with two big-money new faces already clicking is not the disaster script anyone was writing back in July.
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Top thing to say down the pub
Everyone thought Newcastle sacking Eddie Howe in pre-season was going to be a disaster — so far Jaissle's turned it into one of the calmer stories in the league.
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Avoid saying
"Newcastle are still an Eddie Howe team really" — say that to a Newcastle fan now and they'll politely explain Howe left in July, there's a new manager in, and two of the players scoring the goals weren't even at the club last season.
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1Liverpool sacked Arne Slot in the summer — barely a year after he'd delivered the club's 20th league title — following a difficult follow-up season that ended in fifth place. It's a brutal reminder of how quickly things move at the top of this club.
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2New head coach Andoni Iraola arrives from Bournemouth, where he took a club with a fraction of Liverpool's resources into Europe for the first time in their history. Expectations at Anfield are obviously a completely different scale.
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3Iraola is still unbeaten in charge — draws against Newcastle and Nottingham Forest either side of a win away at Ipswich — but he's yet to win a league game at Anfield, which is the box every new Liverpool manager needs to tick early.
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4Bringing in a manager known for high-intensity, front-foot football after Slot's more controlled approach is a genuine change of identity, not just a change of face in the technical area. Worth knowing if you want to sound like you've actually followed the appointment.
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5Liverpool fans have seen title wins and post-title collapses before, so there's more patience for a transition season than outsiders might expect. The demand right now is progress, not instant perfection.
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Top thing to say down the pub
Liverpool went from champions to sacking their manager inside about twelve months, which tells you everything about how this club measures itself.
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Avoid saying
"Liverpool are still basically Klopp's team" — Klopp left years ago, they've had a title-winning manager and a managerial change since, and saying this instantly dates you to a conversation from a completely different era.