Four days after Elland Road, a patched and youthful Newcastle side look for redemption against a Hull team playing with nothing to fear

The touch that put Newcastle behind on Monday night wasn’t even Lewis Miley’s shot. It came off Ao Tanaka’s boot, deflected twice — off Sean Steur, then off Miley — and spun past Lukás Hornícek into the top corner. An own goal by ricochet, the kind no defender can really be blamed for. But football doesn’t deal in exculpatory footnotes. The scoreboard read Miley, 32nd minute, and by full time it read 4-1. Miley had signed a six-year contract back in May, tying his future to the club he joined at seven years old. Now he stood in the wreckage of his own deflection.

Reports from Elland Road described Jaissle losing his temper in the away dressing room before he composed himself for the cameras. Nobody at the club has confirmed that on record. But it fits the gap between what he said in the tunnel and what followed an hour later. In front of the BBC’s microphones, he sounded measured, almost clinical — talking about physicality, fundamentals, the lessons his young side had just been taught the hard way. Later, to Chronicle Live, something rawer surfaced: “It is tough, it is hurtful, and it should be hurtful also for the players and staff.” Two registers, same manager, forty minutes apart.

His pre-match press conference confirmed the scale of the problem without changing the tone. Eight players are absent in total. Dan Burn, Ewen Jaouen, Joelinton and William Osula are out long-term. Nico González is in concussion protocols, Jacob Ramsey injured. Jaissle confirmed Amar Dedić would also miss out. Anthony Elanga’s scan was still pending as he spoke to reporters — the manager wouldn’t call it either way, though he admitted it “doesn’t look that good.” No reinforcements are arriving before Saturday. Asked whether he’d rethink a midfield built on teenagers rather than experience, he didn’t blink: “It will be a young midfield. We trust them. This is our approach… it’s a brave journey the club is going on. I’m fully committed in that, so now if there’s one setback we shouldn’t delete our journey or our vision… We anticipated that something like that against Leeds happened, or is happening also in the next weeks and months. It’s just on us to respond, but still believing, we don’t change that.” Not a manager retreating into caution. One restating the terms of his own project, almost defiantly, as though retreat were never on the table.

Hull aren’t obliging opposition for a rebuilding exercise, though. Sergej Jakirović’s side arrive at St James’ Park fourth in the table. Unbeaten. Eight points from four games. They’ve conceded twice all season — a record newly promoted sides aren’t supposed to carry into late September. They beat Manchester United on the opening weekend. Won away at Coventry. Held Aston Villa scoreless at the MKM. Then went to Stamford Bridge and took a point off Chelsea’s front three. Newcastle, by contrast, sit twelfth with a negative goal difference and a first defeat four days old. Whatever framing this fixture gets, “newly promoted side there for the taking” isn’t the honest version of it. Hull are the form team in the building.

There’s history complicating the redemption story too. St James’ Park has never been kind to Newcastle against this particular opponent — two defeats and a draw there since 2008, no home win in almost two decades of trying. The overall head-to-head is level: two wins apiece, three draws. But Newcastle’s wins in that sequence have all come somewhere other than home. Beating Hull at St James’ Park isn’t a formality Newcastle are overdue. It’s something they simply haven’t managed in a very long time.

Which brings the story back to personnel — and to two names carrying more weight than a routine team-sheet suggests.

Tino Livramento is expected to start at right-back, with Dedić out. What he brings back is something Newcastle have barely had access to all season. The 23-year-old missed England’s World Cup after a calf injury in training. Add two separate knee problems and a hamstring issue last season, and he made just seventeen Premier League appearances in total — a run of misfortune long enough that his best qualities have become almost theoretical to Newcastle supporters rather than remembered: the explosive recovery pace, the willingness to carry the ball vertically rather than simply hold width. He came off the bench at Elland Road and picked up a booking for a combative challenge on Aaronson, which tells its own small story about intent. Leeds exploited exactly the channel he occupies — Bogle in behind, a long throw Newcastle’s back line couldn’t clear. His return offers something more specific than depth: recovery speed, and an attacking outlet down a side that’s been defended statically, out of necessity rather than design, for most of the campaign.

Miley’s case is different, and more personal. This is a player who became Newcastle’s youngest-ever Premier League and Champions League appearance maker — a boyhood academy graduate who’d already lived through one hard year before this one. A freak leg break in training ended his last season early. Weeks later, still recovering, he signed a six-year contract anyway, tying his future to the club regardless. Now, at twenty, he’s the senior name in a midfield Jaissle has chosen to trust rather than reinforce. An own goal by deflection isn’t a performance indictment on its own. But it lands differently on a player whose form across the opening weeks has invited scrutiny rather than deflected it. If Jaissle’s “brave journey” means anything concrete on Saturday, it plays out through players exactly like Miley — not just Newcastle’s collective response to Leeds, but his own, in a stadium that has watched him grow up in front of it.

Hull’s own threat has a name too, and it isn’t the one most previews will reach for. Mohamed Belloumi is a left-footed Algerian winger, signed from Farense for around €5.5 million after Hull’s promotion push. He missed most of the 2024-25 season with an ACL injury. What he’s shown since returning looks less like coincidence and more like a player finally healthy enough to prove why Hull signed him. He scored both of Hull’s goals in the 2-2 draw at Stamford Bridge, cutting in from the right onto his stronger left foot — the way genuinely dangerous inverted wingers do. Two goals and an assist in four league games this season, for a player who spent most of last year on the sidelines. Whichever of Botman, Thiaw or a makeshift back four picks him up on Saturday inherits the problem of a player playing the best football of his career, behind an XI with nothing to fear from the occasion.

Livramento, Miley, Belloumi — three threads, and one stadium that has to hold all of them at once. Whatever else Saturday is about, it’s also fifty-two thousand people watching a returning full-back for signs of his old pace, watching a boyhood favourite for signs he’s shaken off Monday, and watching a Hull winger who’s already shown he doesn’t need an invitation.

St James’ Park still carries its reputation. Football Ground Map named it the best atmosphere in the Premier League as recently as 2018, and the Gallowgate and Leazes ends still do the acoustic work that visiting sides find genuinely uncomfortable. But reputations get tested on afternoons like this one. It’s the first home game since Elland Road. The last match before the international break scatters the squad for a fortnight. There’s a real question over how the ground responds to watching an injury-patched, teenager-heavy XI try to compete again so soon after being physically dismantled. Jaissle has staked his public language on the idea that the crowd stays with the project regardless of result. Whether that holds inside the first twenty minutes — with Hull’s front three moving the ball like a team that knows exactly how good it currently is — is a different question from whether it holds in a press conference.

Newcastle to win this, on balance. 2-1 feels right — Wissa or Barnes finding a way through a Hull defence that’s conceded only twice but hasn’t faced a front line with anything like Newcastle’s underlying quality. But the draw is a live outcome here, not a hedge. Hull haven’t lost. Newcastle haven’t won at St James’ Park against them since the last decade. Nothing in either team’s recent form makes a routine home win the safe assumption it would ordinarily be. Whatever happens, it’s the last word for a fortnight before the internationals scatter this squad across three continents — which makes Saturday’s answer, for better or worse, the one Newcastle will be left sitting with the longest.

Did Jaissle give the team the “hair dryer” treatment after the last game’s disappointment? Will the team be able to bounce back strong in front of a sell out crowd? Join the conversation on X @mytoonarmy #NUFC