Newcastle 1-1 Aston Villa - 8 Things We Learned From Villa Draw
4. NUFC Should Have Signed Andy Carroll
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This is not necessarily a criticism of the transfer policy at the club, or the activity that was completed over the summer, which I personally was quietly happy with, since the club managed to keep hold of the big five stars, despite the best attempts of their agents. No, this is a criticism of the approach Newcastle took to offensive play for a good deal of the match on Sunday - knocking long balls towards or over the front-men who never look particularly keen or capable of holding the ball up in the way an Andy Carroll or an Alan Shearer would have. Newcastle play far more fluid offensive football when they pass the ball on the floor, bringing the strikers into play to take advantage of their skills, rather than attempting to play them into a system not suited to their strengths. It's like trying to plough a field with an award-winning race horse. And yet even when Papiss Cisse and Demba Ba began to look frustrated - especially Cisse - Newcastle persisted with a long delivery game that simply wasn't working, albeit apart from once in the build-up to the Ben Arfa goal, but even then that was more thanks to Villa's inability to defend rather than the precision of the pass. We joked in the stands early on that it looked like Newcastle had spent the week in the run-up to the game training as if they had expected to sign Andy Carroll, and unfortunately nobody seems to have told the team or the manager that it was a joke. Perhaps if we had signed him, Newcastle might have enjoyed a bit more joy in attack from a more direct approach, as West Ham did on Saturday before his injury, and that gameplan certainly suited someone of his presence, which the Magpies obviously lacked. If you want to play like that, you have to go for the right players - and the idea that we didn't sign Andy Carroll because we no longer played a system to accommodate him looked perverse throughout the game on Sunday.