Newcastle vs Liverpool: A Night of Dreams and Drama
The board went up: five added minutes at St James’ Park.
On the touchline, Matthias Jaissle started windmilling his arms, demanding one last surge of noise. The message was clear. So was the response.
“Sing your hearts out for the lads.”
Newcastle were 2-1 up on Liverpool. The place shook. Yet nobody in black and white needed reminding what this fixture does in the dying moments. It carries history. It carries scars.
Stan Collymore. 1996. 4-3 at Anfield. Kevin Keegan slumped over the hoardings, a modern image of heartbreak. Those memories hung in the night air as the two clubs came together to honour Keegan, with his family and a roll call of his old lieutenants — Alan Shearer, Rob Lee, Tino Asprilla — watching from the directors’ box.
Below them, Wor Flags turned St James’ Park into a canvas. Every seat covered, the Gallowgate End roaring beneath a banner that could have come straight from Keegan’s own playbook.
“I want people to dream about their football club. They should. We should all be dreamers at heart. Some people are the opposite and say, ‘We can’t do that’. But when you ask them why, they can’t give a reason. Well, I say, ‘Why not?’”
The words felt pointed. And timely.
A club that has lost Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes in the last year. A club that has seen Eddie Howe depart. A club turning to a young, untested-in-England head coach and a squad being rebuilt with players aged 24 and under, none of them with Premier League minutes before this summer.
Plenty outside Tyneside looked at that and shrugged: they’ll struggle.
Inside, the mood was very different. Injured captain Dan Burn has spoken about Newcastle thriving when it feels like “us against the world”. Jaissle hears that too. He knew the noise around Isak’s return, even from the sidelines, would give the night extra voltage.
“If you have this synergy between the fans and then the players delivering on the pitch, something special can be created,” he said.
For long spells, it looked like the start of something. The intensity. The direct balls in behind. The grit and the graft. The way they snapped into duels and refused to let Liverpool breathe.
No one embodied it more than Amar Dedic. Signed from Benfica for £30m on Tuesday, thrown straight in on Sunday, he played like he’d been here for years. But the real intrigue came from some of last summer’s nearly-men, suddenly looking reborn.
Anthony Elanga set the tone with the opener, a crisp, low finish into the bottom corner. Yoane Wissa, so often on the fringes last season, played like a man finally trusted. He laid on Joe Willock’s goal after coming off the bench and spent the evening dragging Liverpool’s defenders into places they didn’t want to go.
The numbers told their own story. Wissa, a forward, won more duels than any Newcastle player — 11 in total. That is not a cameo. That is a statement.
“The manager expects me to be a leader and lead the group,” the 29-year-old told Sky Sports. “He wants me to be winning balls, making sure everyone is going forward, going for the kill, and sometimes just be calm.”
Jaissle loved it. Almost. He still pointed out that Wissa had the chance to “kill the game” and make it 3-1. That, of course, is the old wound.
Newcastle’s Achilles heel last season was brutal and simple: they could not hold what they had. No team dropped more points from winning positions in 2025-26 — 27 in total. Howe admitted in May that “anything can happen” once that habit seeps in.
On Sunday, it happened again.
The clock ticked into stoppage time. The whistles from the home end were ferocious now, an attempt to blow the final attack away. Liverpool came anyway. One last surge, one last ball, one last desperate run.
Victor Munoz darted into the box. Lewis Hall, legs heavy, clipped him. Down he went.
Stuart Attwell pointed to the spot.
Jaissle tore off his blazer in fury, convinced it was “soft”. The stadium froze for a heartbeat, then erupted in protest. None of it changed the outcome.
Dominik Szoboszlai stepped up. Cool, clinical, familiar. Another late Liverpool punch in a rivalry that specialises in them. 2-2. Two points gone.
Afterwards, in the press room, Jaissle paused for a long time before he spoke.
“I cannot repeat everything because I could get in trouble and may need to pay some fines,” he said, the irritation still clear.
“But, overall, I told them that I’m really proud of what I saw over the 90 minutes. This is a really top starting point.”
It had been a Keegan-style game on a Keegan-themed night: wild, open, lurching from one end to the other, heavy on emotion and light on restraint. The kind of match that leaves managers drained and supporters addicted.
The reaction at full-time mattered. Many stayed. They clapped, not out of politeness, but with the sense that they had seen something worth investing in.
“We were there for each other if something went wrong,” Jaissle said. “We acted like a unit. In such a short amount of time, this is a top starting point and the frustration was there as well, but these are the challenges we have now.
“With the pre-season, with the transition phase, it’s normal. Today someone threw stones in the way and we need to take that out to be successful again.”
Newcastle walked off with only a point, the old frailty still lurking. But the noise, the energy, the bite of this new side hinted at something else: a team determined to prove that, even stripped back and written off, dreaming big on Tyneside is not finished yet.
