New dawn fades

What we really needed was the sort of result that would shut the media doom-and-gloom mongers up. What we got was a whimpering defeat at home to Spurs, an appropriately dismal end to a week best forgotten. The way things are looking, it might not be the last time this season that we have a week best forgotten.

It all started off promisingly enough. Bellamy carried on where he left off for Wales in midweek, tormenting the Spurs defence with his electrifying pace and movement, while Paul Robinson pulled off a number of crucial stops in the opposition goal, most notably to deny Milner his first strike in a Newcastle shirt.

But after the break, once Spurs took the lead, all that promise evaporated and we allowed the rest of the game to drift along in depressingly insipid fashion, conceding the initiative to a side we should outclass comfortably and never really looking like snatching a point.

Incidentally, in my season preview I wrote: “With the installation of a new management and coaching team comprising of Jacques Santini, Frank Arnesen and Martin Jol, I fully expected Spurs to go on and make significant waves in the transfer market, but it just hasn’t happened. Sean Davis and Paul Robinson are valuable additions to the squad, but there doesn’t seem to have been any momentum”. Oh yes, that's right - goalscorer Thimothee Atouba was one of those I wrote off as an insignificant addition to their squad. Hopefully this will be the first and last time my dismissive overview of our rivals comes back to bite me in the arse, but then I’m not optimistic…

Reality bites, then – hard. The potential’s still there, but at the moment, as for the majority of last season, we’re simply not as good as the sum of our parts suggests we should be.