Entering a tough spot for any team is difficult and with many factors currently contributing to our recent downfall in form I decided to investigate one of those reasons further.

The issue I focused on in my investigation was that of Eddie Howe having too much loyalty or “favourites”. So, I have searched through the archives of every lineup Eddie has used for Newcastle in competitive fixtures, listed every player who played a minimum of one minute and I have found some interesting and worrying results.

So, I suppose the first statistic that would interest people is just how many players has Eddie used in just over two years in charge? The answer: 43 players. That is 43 players in 102 games working out at an average of 26 games per player. Which may not seem staggering, but the average players used a season sits between 27-32 different players and 43 in two years and three months signifies that perhaps we are either understaffed or a more concerning issue is afoot.

How many of these players can we disregard? Players such as Ben Parkinson, Michael Ndiweni, Alex Murphy, and Amadou Diallo have all only played off the bench so for arguments sake I’m going to remove them from my study for now. Same with the following: Loris Karius, Isaac Hayden, Jeff Hendrick, Dwight Gayle, Federico Fernandez, and Jamal Lewis who all got less than five appearances in Howe’s reign. That’s a removal of ten players there which takes us to just 33 or one above the average some teams use in a season! The big question then is why?

Why? The answer to me is simple and I need to touch on my research again. I used a spreadsheet and in the spreadsheet, I assigned a colour to starts/subs/not played and honestly for certain players it is just one continuous line of green. Schar, Joelinton, Bruno, Trippier, Pope, Almiron all seem to have never ending green lines and factor in Burn, Longstaff, Gordon, Wilson, Isak who all have lines of green/yellow and the immediate problem presents itself; Eddie is shy to experiment.

32 players who have played over five games in two years is ridiculous and shows an incredible lack of rotation in a squad that’s number one reason for everything at the moment is tiredness and injuries and no wonder why. When you play players this much, they are going to pick up injuries they are going to be knackered and this is something I feel like hasn’t been dealt with as well as it could have been at Newcastle. Tino for instance should never have been dropped for Burn coming back, Hall needs more gametime surely and then you have the curious case of Dummett who has made two appearances from the start all season.

I still believe fully in Eddie to turn this around and get us out of this slump, but my god do I hope he starts rotating. Any opinions on the research and what do you think is the reason?