Anthony Gordon is half lightning bolt, half question mark, an enigmatic footballer with searing pace whose sharp fluctuations of form and consistency entirely mirror those of Newcastle United.
Is Gordon having a great season or a mediocre one? What about his club? It is possible to make a plausible argument in both directions, but competing narratives meld into a single story of durability and, yes, achievement.
Eleven days after Newcastle lost 3-2 at home to Brentford and Eddie Howe admitted, “I’m obviously not doing my job well enough,” his team won their third match in succession, all of them away and in three separate competitions. Until that point, Newcastle had been allergic to playing outside St James’ Park, which now feels like a small detail in an extraordinary week of reset and transformation.
Gordon is Newcastle’s bellwether. If you only watched Howe’s team in the Champions League, where they have progressed beyond the group stages for the first time in their history, you could safely describe the England forward as a game-changer and a match-winner. He has been essential and brilliant, scoring 10 goals, a total which only Real Madrid’s Kylian Mbappe can better. This is elite company.
If you only watched Newcastle in the Premier League, where they sit 10th, you might have formulated a slightly different opinion. Gordon has scored three times (but only once from open play in 13 months), and Howe has regularly fielded questions about the 24-year-old that have been framed around the notion of struggle, of his failure to impact games in a positive manner.
It should go without saying that if you watch Newcastle every week, then you will have long accepted that this is a reliably befuddling football club and either be at peace with it or be questioning your life choices, but this is another matter.
Yet if struggle has been a feature of Newcastle’s and Gordon’s entwined existence, then another way of looking at it is that the struggle continues. They keep on keeping on, finding a way when stretched to their limits, not where they want to be in the league table, but retaining their hold on the Carabao Cup until the semi-finals and still in the FA Cup. Much of this season has shrunk away from joy, but somehow it has also been impressive.
Qarabag were far from that. Five goals down at half-time, the Azerbaijani champions were hapless and guileless, incapable of delaying or deflecting Gordon’s acceleration and utterly without attacking merit until the game was yanked far beyond them. For Newcastle, it brought comfort. Very little has come easy since their fragmented and disrupted summer, with a team in transition and a head coach groping for solutions, but this was a welcome exception.
Given their intense schedule of matches — there has been no free week, not including international breaks, since August — it means that Tuesday’s second leg will feel like a gimme, a breather, allowing Howe the option to genuinely rotate rather than simply respond to workload and fitness. In the second half against Qarabag, he was able to bring on five players, which included a debut for the academy graduate, Sean Neave, with the aim of containment rather than the chaos of chasing.
Gordon celebrates after Wednesday’s game (Giorgi Arjevanidze/AFP via Getty Images)
Newcastle have never previously scored six goals in a European fixture, and Gordon was the frontrunner, a man in a hurry in more ways than one. His 33-minute hat trick, his first in senior football, was the quickest by an English player — or any player at an English club — in the Champions League. He is now Newcastle’s leading scorer in the competition, his 10 goals overhauling Alan Shearer’s six, although that is more a measure of underachievement.
Four of them came against Qarabag, the first arriving in the third minute, when Dan Burn, channelling his inner Andrea Pirlo, threaded the ball through to Gordon, who shot across goal with his right foot. For his third, he ran onto a stubbed, looping pass from Nick Woltemade and edged around the goalkeeper. On either side, there were a pair of penalties, dispatched with confidence and intent. Malick Thiaw and Jacob Murphy chipped in with the others, although it was hard to keep count.
For the second time this season, Gordon refused to give way when a Newcastle team-mate had the temerity to suggest someone else might have a go. At Union St Gilloise in October, Woltemade pleaded his case and then looked distraught when Gordon gripped the ball and converted. On this occasion, Kieran Trippier made Woltemade’s case for him, a case which Gordon rejected. The argument flared up again as they walked off at half time.
There is absolutely no question whose side Shearer would be on. Give up a penalty? You’re having a laugh.
And it was smiles afterwards, with Trippier and Gordon appearing together in an interview with TNT Sports. “We’re a team,” Gordon said. “We should be in it together. But I’m an attacker. I’m the penalty taker, and I want to score as many goals as I can. I understand everyone’s opinion and emotions do get high but (Trippier) is one of my closest team-mates. Since I joined the club, he’s done so much for me.”
Trippier smirked and said: “Boxing gloves in training.”
This fight, this unquenchable thirst for goals, is precisely what Newcastle need and precisely what they need from Gordon. He is not there yet. With more composure, four goals could have been six or feasibly more, but it is not a coincidence that Gordon has started two of these vital three victories — at Tottenham Hotspur and in Baku — and played as a central forward, where his pace and pressing most closely replicates the formula Howe had with Alexander Isak. He has been a tone-setter.
In turn, the tone has changed around Newcastle these past few days; less shrill, less edgy, less perilous. Post-Brentford, they asked questions of themselves and each other — nobody more so than Howe — and Gordon has led from the front. He has provided an answer.
“To go from what we went through to being in the position we are in now is really important and it shows the character we have,” he said. “We’ve got to keep it going, keep the momentum, because it can go the other way just as fast.”
Used like this, velocity with ferocity is a potent weapon.