Eleven days ago, Newcastle United were a club in crisis and Eddie Howe sought solace with his children. Three games, three wins and a 5,000-mile round bender to Baku later, 2,000 of their delirious fans proclaimed proudly that a few days in Azerbaijan was the best trip they had ever been on.
Sometimes it’s difficult to keep up with Newcastle, a football club that rises and falls emotionally in a similar fashion to the intonations of the Geordie accent that has left locals charmed and bewildered here in the capital of Azerbaijan this week.
Even a quite glorious night for Anthony Gordon, who became only the second player in the history of the Champions League to score four goals in a single half of football, had a sting in its tail. Two of those four goals were from penalties and taking the second one in first-half stoppage time upset team-mates Kieran Trippier and Nick Woltemade, themselves potential penalty takers.
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Newcastle were 5-0 up when the half-time whistle went, two minutes after that penalty had been cracked home by Gordon and as excited local children jumped up and down next to the dugout, shouting “Gordon” and waving bits of paper asking for his strip, the England winger was involved in a verbal row with team-mate Trippier. It looked as if Trippier was still unhappy with Gordon’s decision to take the kick himself and grab his fourth goal. It needed the 6ft7in frame of Dan Burn to step in between the pair.
Gordon put Newcastle in front in the third minute after latching on to Burn’s perfectly-weighted through ball
GIORGI ARJEVANIDZE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Of course this is Newcastle United — mood swings and all that — so come the 68th minute — by which time Qarabag had scored with their first shot on target — when Gordon was substituted, he walked off directly past Trippier, the former England captain high-fiving his four-goal scoring team-mate before the two men embraced on the pitch.
That put the spotlight back on what Gordon had done with his feet, and it was some feat.
The first three of his goals came inside 33 minutes, which made it the earliest hat-trick ever scored by an Englishman in the Champions League, the previous record, 36 minutes, belonging to a certain Alan Shearer, against Bayer Leverkusen back in 2003.
The contentious goal, the fourth from the penalty spot — which Shearer would never have given to a team-mate to take (Shearer laughed off Paul Robinson’s request to take the second penalty in the 8-0 win over Sheffield Wednesday in 1999), means he now shares that four goals in one half Champions League achievement with Luiz Adriano, who did it for Shakhtar Donetsk against BATE Borisov in 2014. Those four goals took Gordon to ten in this season’s Champions League, second only to Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappé.
Gordon was clumsily brought down by Kochalski in the box in first-half stoppage time…
GIORGI ARJEVANIDZE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
…and the 24-year-old made no mistake from the spot for a second time as he buried another penalty for his fourth goal of the night
GIORGI ARJEVANIDZE/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
It was some half of football. Newcastle and Howe could not have shown any more desire to kill this two-legged play-off stone dead at the first attempt. There were 16 shots in that half, and 11 of them were on target for the overwhelmed Mateusz Kochalski in the Qarabag goal. Kochalski needed treatment in those opening 45 minutes, presumably for a rest. He stopped Gordon twice when clean through and denied Harvey Barnes a hat-trick. At times it looked like he was playing Newcastle on his own.
Newcastle had a stranglehold on the game from the very first whistle. That game 11 days ago was a 3-2 home defeat by Brentford. It had followed another two defeats. Since then there have been wins away to Tottenham Hotspur in the Premier League, at Aston Villa in the FA Cup and now this in the Champions League, and the characteristic that Howe demands from his players has returned: that relentless pressing.
Kochaiski had saved from Barnes in the first minute before Gordon raced onto a fine ball from Burn in the third minute before cracking a first-time shot into the bottom corner. Trippier crossed for Malick Thiaw to head in a second after eight minutes and when the referee, Espen Eskas, was instructed by the VAR to go to the pitchside screen to view a potential handball, Gordon had his first chance to fire home from the penalty spot, which he did.
Murphy celebrates scoring Newcastle’s sixth goal to further cement their control of the tie before the return leg at St James’ Park next Tuesday
CHRISTIAN KASPAR-BARTKE/UEFA/GETTY IMAGES
Three minutes later, in the 35th minute, Gordon went round the goalkeeper before cracking in his hat-trick goal. He was fouled to create the second penalty, which he took himself and while Qarabag were better in the second half — their goal came from Elvin Ceferquliyev — Jacob Murphy would have the final word, scoring Newcastle’s sixth. Barring some form of footballing miracle next week at St James’ Park, Newcastle will take their place in the knockout phase of the Champions League for the first time in the club’s history.
Crisis. What crisis?