“We’ll take a point, and move on to next week,” is a consolatory phrase that only certain Premier League managers ought to use - and only then in particular situations.
It is rhetoric reserved for under-dogs fighting valiantly against relegation, coming up for air after a particularly gruelling encounter in which a draw is a fair, and useful, point on the board.
It really should not be the pull-quote from Steve Bruce’s post-match interview after Newcastle United’s 0-0 draw with West Brom. Within it lurks an acceptance of the mediocre that has left supporters fed up with their manager.
Newcastle fans are regularly accused of entitlement by the media when in reality all they ask for is the bare minimum; something to cheer on, some sign of progress, reason to be hopeful.
Those expectations have only come into sharper focus over the last 12 months as the toll of the Covid-19 pandemic is reflected back at them in the form of dull, apathetic football.
The issues at Newcastle go considerably deeper than the manager, of course, who is only a small part of Mike Ashley’s overall ownership of the club, and yet we are well beyond the point at which Bruce is blameless.
He is, in fact, a perfect fit for the Ashley model; sleepwalking into disaster.
Under Bruce, a gradual slide has seen Newcastle tread water for so long that finally they are beginning to drown. They are just one point above the dotted line now and, in keeping with Ashley’s lengthy history of delaying action for too long, reports indicate there are no plans to let Bruce go.
The club must try to climb out of the quagmire with Bruce at the helm, and even before we get into the tactical details of his tenure at St James’ Park there are numerous reasons to believe it might not be possible.
His self-assurance, told in sighs and shakes of the head, shows just how deeply he misunderstands the importance of emotion, ambition, and desire to his club’s supporters.
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From the outside, it would appear he believes his remit is to chug along one point at a time. And appearance is everything. Bruce is losing that psychological battle.
The plight of Newcastle supporters will be familiar to fans of Aston Villa, a similar-sized club whose fan base grew weary of Bruce’s much-derided assertion that Villa would be ‘there or thereabouts’ come the end of the season.
That dangling ‘thereabouts’ says it all, and sure enough Villa – playing achingly dull football - hovered in roughly the right zone of the Championship before, after two years, things collapsed.
We are approaching that point at Newcastle, except this time there is a reported player revolt further souring the mood.
A training ground bust-up between Bruce and Matt Ritchie was revealed last week, which follows the manager publicly criticising his players’ attitudes in January: “the gloves are off now and we will do it my way.”
The dispute was about tactics, with the players preferring the back five deployed by Rafael Benitez while Bruce wanted to take a new direction, and indeed it perhaps helps explain the club’s incoherence since Bruce arrived in July 2019.
Up until January this year Newcastle played predominantly in a deep, non-confrontational 5-4-1 formation. They didn’t press, didn’t counter-attack with any real rhythm, and rarely even stayed together in their defensive blockade.
By and large Newcastle have been consistently porous between the lines, stretched too long vertically to stop the opposition from simply playing through them. It was almost as if they were trapped between two ideologies, too hesitant to step up the pitch but not committed enough to sitting back.
Meandering, aimless football – that seemed to neatly encapsulate the Newcastle brand under Ashley – was punctuated by moments of individualism from Allan Saint-Maximin, or by backs-to-the-walls results against the ‘Big Six’.
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Bruce’s frustrated attempts to move the players away from Benitez’s methods may have been the cause of this limbo. But in recent weeks Bruce has moved to his favoured four-man defence and Newcastle have notably pushed 20 yards up the pitch.
Finally leaving their limbo, Bruce has also begun to deploy a diamond 4-4-2 in which the full-backs are encouraged to fly up the wings while Miguel Almiron enjoys a free role behind two strikers. It sounds good, but it doesn’t quite work out that way.
Bruce has been very vocal about the tactical switch – “rather than sitting deep and playing off a low block it's to try to get higher up the pitch” – but the standards are low.
Speaking of their more attacking setup after the FA Cup defeat to Arsenal, Bruce said he hoped fans “enjoyed watching their team give it their all.” Newcastle had held 38 per cent possession and had four shots on target in 120 minutes against a second-string Arsenal team.
To his credit, a 2-0 win at Everton and a 3-0 victory over Southampton (both in the diamond 4-4-2) looked to have breathed new life into Newcastle, only for the dull football to return in subsequent matches.
Even with Saint-Maximin back from injury, there is a sense Newcastle will ultimately regress to the defensive football that has characterised Bruce’s managerial career.
It is telling that just before Bruce told reporters “we’ll take a point” after that awful, soulless 0-0 draw with West Brom, he said “it was important that we didn't lose the game,” presumably because that meant they were still keeping clear of Fulham.
But Fulham promptly won at Anfield a few hours later. That’s the problem with taking the point, with tolerating poor performance, and with feeling OK about achieving the bare minimum: eventually you sleepwalk into disaster, and by the time you wake up it’s already too late.