Eddie Howe offers up no surprises - Team news to face Manchester City

Newcastle United are about to take on Manchester City in the 5:30pm Premier League kick-off at St James' Park.

We made our prediction yesterday and got it 100% spot on - that would be an achievement if there were literally any wiggle room in the squad.

The only real change that could have been made would be having Tino Livramento on over Dan Burn, but we knew Eddie Howe wouldn't drop Burn if he didn't have to. Also, Tino didn't even make the bench.

Kevin De Bruyne is on the bench for City

The good news from Manchester City is that Kevin de Bruyne starts on the bench. The bad news is Manchester City have Kevin de Bruyne on the bench.

Newcastle are in for a tough evening, but they can hark back to earlier in the season when they knocked the Premier League champions out of the Carabao Cup.

Man City are not invincible, they've proved that many times this season, and while our form hasn't been the best going into this game, last week's derby win was a nice little shot of adrenaline into our season and hopefully the lads can carry that into this game.

Good times are on the horizon

A two-week break follows this game so we just need to get it out of the way before the lads can regroup and rest to attack the second half of the season much stronger.

Fixtures will be less frequent and hopefully, players will be returning from injury so things could start to look up for us.

Basically, this is a free hit. If we get beat let's not panic, let's not turn on each other/the team/the manager. Things will improve very soon.