Newcastle's feel-good start under Matthias Jaissle was leaning on one player, and that player just pulled up clutching his hamstring.
Anthony Elanga is set to miss around six to eight weeks after picking up a hamstring injury in Newcastle's 4-1 defeat at Leeds, an estimate that remains provisional pending further scans. Before that match, Jaissle admitted the problem "doesn't look good." Ahead of the following fixture against Hull, he still had no firm answer: "No real update on Anthony, spoke with him now, he is heading for an MRI scan. We will get more clarity after that and hope it's not too serious. It is sad after the great start he had; he is a key strength in our squad; we want to stay positive."
Stay positive, sure. But listen to what Jaissle actually said there: "a key strength in our squad." Not one of several. A key strength. That's the problem with how good this start felt.
Go back a year and Elanga was the £55 million signing who couldn't buy a Premier League goal. Newcastle brought him in from Nottingham Forest, where he'd racked up six goals and 11 assists as Forest finished seventh. Then he arrived on Tyneside and delivered next to nothing in front of goal, failing to score in the league for Newcastle across a season that produced just one assist in 32 matches. That's a lost year, not a slow patch.
So the reversal was genuinely stunning. Two matches, two goals to open this campaign, in my view exactly the jolt the crowd wanted. He struck barely five minutes into the opener against Liverpool and then broke the deadlock against Tottenham. Overnight the £55 million flop became the £55 million weapon, and Newcastle's attack suddenly looked reborn.
Truth is, calling it reborn oversold it. It was hot, plain and simple. There's a difference, and it's exactly what an injury like this exposes. A revival built on depth survives losing a starter. A revival built on one man's purple patch does not. When the guy carrying the narrative goes down and the manager's first instinct is to call him a key strength rather than reach for the next name off the bench, you're being told how shallow the pool actually is.
This didn't happen in a vacuum, either. It landed in the same week Newcastle shipped four at Elland Road, Jaissle's first defeat in the job. A bright opening month doesn't erase a night like that. It just delays the reckoning until the schedule stops handing you favorable matchups and your best form player is in the treatment room.
Some caveats: the season is only a handful of matchweeks old, the timeline is just an estimate, and Elanga could beat it. Other players can catch hot streaks too. Maybe someone steps up and this becomes a footnote.
But if you're a Newcastle fan, the honest question is who scores while he's gone, not when he's back. If the answer takes you more than a second, you already know how much of this start was really his, and how little of it was built to last without him.
