Barnes wraps up Newcastle win against Brighton to ease pressure on Howe

Brighton had limbered up for this trip to Tyneside by working out with an acclaimed German cage fighter. The idea was that a spot of mixed martial arts training would toughen up Fabian Hürzeler’s players at set pieces and enable them to pack a collective punch far too powerful for Newcastle to resist.

Happily for Eddie Howe and his players it did not quite work out like that. On a day when Yasir al-Rumayyan, Newcastle’s chair, and a delegation of his colleagues from the club’s majority owners, Saudi Arabian’s Public Investment Fund, looked on from the director’s box, Howe’s team finally ended a debilitating run of five straight defeats.