A-League All Stars 8-0 Newcastle United - A pointless exercise complete

Newcastle United finished off their Australian trip by being put well and truly to the sword by a team that doesn't even exist.

The A-League All Stars made light work of Eddie Howe's kids at the Marvel stadium coming away 8-0 winners. Yes, that's eight, it's not a typo. They also had two goals disallowed and had a shot that hit both posts and bounced out.

Eddie Howe fielded a team with zero first-team stars in it which, if you're a fan in Australia who paid to go to this game, is absolutely disgraceful. Even the commentators towards the end of the match were discussing if it was actually disrespectful by Eddie Howe to field the team he did.

Disrespectful or not, the outcome was embarrassing. Yes they're just youngsters going up against experienced players, but these are supposed to be the future stars of the club.

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The future is not so bright if this is anything to go by

In a cruel ironic twist, the best players our there in green were the ones who are destined to leave the club in Amadou Diallo and Lucas de Bolle. Except for Norwegian, Travis Hernes, they were the only players that looked to have anything about them.

This was a trip that was meant to grow our global reach, and bring in fans from the southern hemisphere - who is going to want to follow the team that got shafted 8-0 by a team thrown together a few days beforehand?

As a PR exercise, it's a failure. As a showcase for our young talent, it's an epic failure. We can't imagine what this has done to the confidence of those players who took part today.

We feel bad for the Aussie fans who paid to watch that

Again, though, it's the Aussie fans who paid to go see that game that we feel sorry for. For weeks they'll have been excited about getting to see their heroes in action in their own country and they rock up to see a team sheet full of names they've never heard of.

The trip down under came under a lot of fire from outsiders and even Newcastle players, and by doing what we just did, we've just given those detractors another bucket of ammunition and aimed their guns for them.

The result means nothing at the end of the day, but it's what it means in terms of the PR and the confidence of the youngsters and the message it sends to our foreign fans - you're not worthy of seeing our best players.

Honestly, we're disgusted by the whole thing. It might seem like an overreaction to some, but we feel we've got a valid point here.