Newcastle cannot complain they were not warned. Eddie Howe had cautioned his players that Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang was “as good as ever’ and would need to be “controlled” but ultimately they proved powerless to prevent the 36-year-old transforming both the match and Marseille’s Champions League ambitions.
While Aubameyang fulfilled the soaring expectations of a raucously loud audience at this stupendously designed, wonderfully atmospheric arena, Howe’s team started well but ended up mugged in the manner of naive tourists who had wandered into the wrong arrondissement of this beguiling yet sometimes brutal city.
Although they retain genuine hopes of European advancement, their persistent travel sickness dictated unwanted playoff involvement may yet be required.
Harvey Barnes is far too talented to have spent so much of his Newcastle career warming the bench but here Eddie Howe hit upon a solution as to how to force two into one and accommodate both his left wingers, Barnes and Anthony Gordon, in the starting XI.
It involved that duo morphing into a front two in a 3-5-2 formation that contained no room for Newcastle’s £70m Germany striker Nick Woltemade. Yet if Howe was happy to rotate Woltemade, Sandro Tonali enjoys virtually undroppable status on Tyneside.
