Newcastle United is a wonderful club in a magnificent city but it can be claustrophobic, a difficult and demanding place to play football. It can feel so intense at times that it is difficult to breath let alone relax and reflect, suffocating and stifling.

And the walls are closing in on the team and manager Steve Bruce, the atmosphere, toxic all season, is now so poisonous it could prove fatal. Relegation is a very clear and present danger again.

Newcastle is a club that is never far away from a crisis. It is the heavy price you pay when you have an owner like Mike Ashley, a management structure which lacks the required talent and expertise and a recruitment model that views players as individuals, never as part of a coherent team building project.

There was always going to come a time this season when Newcastle faltered and floundered. They are not a very good team, have not been playing well and got lucky so many times over the course of the first half of the season, you always knew there would come a point when that deserted them too.

It was always the danger, it was what we all thought would happen last summer when Rafa Benitez refused his new contract, left it until five weeks before the start of the season to admit it and Steve Bruce was hastily appointed as an emergency replacement.