Alan Shearer points finger at what's going wrong for Newcastle United this season after woeful display against Wolves
To say that Newcastle United looked bereft of ideas against Wolverhampton Wanderers on Sunday would be putting it mildly.
The fact that the Magpies had just two shots on target all game, and they came within 10 seconds of each other in the 85th minute, tells you all you need to know.
While Alan Shearer offered up an excuse for why Newcastle are so poor away from home on The Rest Is Football podcast, his earlier point rings more true.
Shearer says that the St James' Park crowd is what gets Newcastle over the line during home games, and without that on the road, they seem lost. It's a reasonable excuse, but it's not one that should make that much difference. If you can't motivate yourself to play well without thousands of people shouting your name, you've got bigger problems.
Alan Shearer believes Newcastle's summer recruitment has let them down
The point that Shearer made that holds more weight was his initial one about the summer signings not integrating as well as they should have by now is a bigger concern.
"Their recruitment hasn't worked as yet, certainly in the summer. They spent a lot of money in the summer, and the only one, at the minute, on a regular basis who is performing for Newcastle is Malick Thiaw.
"When you look at (Nick) Woltemade, we've not seen anywhere near the best of him yet. (Yoane)Wissa, exactly the same. (Anthony) Elanga, really, really struggling for form and for confidence, looks really bereft of any belief in himself, and I know Jacob Ramsey wasn't involved, but that's a lot of money on four players and those players have yet to hit the heights that you'd hope."
Why hasn't our summer recruitment worked out?
The former Newcastle striker also went on to make his point again about the crosses into the box not being attacked by the forwards, which he had posted about during the game on social media.
We can't get our heads around the issues with the summer recruitment not working. We bought some really good players, and we've seen moments from Wissa and Woltemade that makes us believe they will come good. We've seen nothing from Elanga yet, but we saw enough when he was at Nottingham Forest to know he's way better than he has been for us.
What we don't understand is why they aren't performing. With all of the work that goes into scouting players, surely the club learned enough to know whether or not these players could adapt to Eddie Howe's style of play; otherwise we wouldn't pursue them, right? Is it a scouting issue? Or should there have been some sort of compromise from Howe to adapt the way he wants to play to better suit the players at his disposal?
At this point, we're just questioning everything because we have no answers for any of it.
