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Newcastle United and Sunderland take their final mock exam today and will be hoping their German test goes better than the rest of their dress rehearsals.

Hannover and Borussia Monchengladbach – a very useful side who play under progressive one-to-watch coach Lucien Favre – are going to be provide stiff competition for two clubs that still look distinctly like works in progress.

Pre-season is a phoney war ripe for faux outrage and anyone getting too worked up about less-than-spectacular displays against Doncaster and York City needs to take a step back and consider what these games really mean. In a former role reporting on Wolverhampton Wanderers, Mick McCarthy once told me he wished all of pre-season could be played behind-closed-doors – and he used some fairly industrial language to describe people who read too much into them.

Still, while both clubs look better than they did when they limped over the line towards safety back in May, there’s a feeling that the pair of them are waiting for the defining deal – in or out – of the summer.

Newcastle need, in this order, another central defender, a resolution to the Fabricio Coloccini saga and a winger capable of dovetailing properly with Aleksandar Mitrovic, who needs service to ensure that his confidence and attacking brio isn’t drained the way that it was for Manu Riviere last autumn.

Sunderland require a creative player to pull the strings in central midfield and a striker. It would also be preferable if they could trim some of the fat from a squad that has no further use for Gus Poyet recruits Will Buckley and Liam Bridcutt, who failed to make the jump from Championship to Premier League.

It was at this point last season where the two clubs hesitated and made fatal errors which set in motion the chain of events that led to that frantic battle for survival. The foundations weren’t quite as solid last season – Newcastle seemed to have run out of money and willingness while Sunderland’s transfer team were deadlocked in a damaging and pointless battle of wills between Lee Congerton and Poyet – but nonetheless, there may be similarities. There is still work to be done.

It seems bizarre that a season that finished late is starting earlier – and even more ridiculous that the transfer window extends so deep into the season.

This year there will be an extra week of matches before the transfer window snaps shut on September 1 at the more reasonable hour of 6pm – taking the number of fixtures played before a potentially season-defining day at the fag end of the British summer to four. That’s actually 10% of the season gone before anyone needs to show their hand in the transfer market. The Premier League shouldn’t allow this to happen.

Squads should be finalised long before the campaign kicks off and the potentially destabilising effect of the transfer window adds a distracting and unnecessary extra factor into the early weeks of the season which doesn’t exactly help clubs that plan well, manage themselves sensibly and seek to establish their squads in the early part of the summer. The whole thing seems to favour those, like Harry Redknapp, who see thumbing through a Rolodex for the names and numbers of agents who might be able to deliver an established player at a premium on the hope that it pays off.

Newcastle used to say they wouldn’t get involved in this late dash for players after working so hard on trying to get value in the market in the preceding months but as they found out last season with a squad that was well shy of the required numbers and quality, sometimes you might actually need to get involved in the bunfight. The amount of money squandered in those final weeks – cash that might be better spent improving other things at Premier League clubs – is depressing.

The parade of players through the doors of clubs desperate from losing their first few games can be a dispiriting part of deadline day, which seems to exist only to fatten the pockets of agents and faded stars who have waited just long enough to hit the jackpot in those final few hours of a long summer.

Of course the Premier League and the FA will argue that if the window was shut before the season started, it would hand a competitive advantage to other European leagues who could still deal. Clubs would certainly oppose giving German and Spanish rivals the chance to do business while English teams, despite the TV wealth, sat on their hands.

A personal preference – which is not what Fifa want – would be to scrap the window entirely if it can’t be co-ordinated properly to make it a fair fight across Europe. Can the Premier League not just allow clubs to keep dealing right through until January, when European clubs are able to do so again? There seems no chance of that, so United and Sunderland will have to switch in the coming weeks from being doughty dealers to poker players. Charlie Austin is a deal that looks just like that: QPR need him to go, Austin wants to leave and Newcastle want him.

But the two parties are about £3million apart in valuation and Rangers are convinced that as September looms, someone will match their £15million price.

If United lose their first couple of games, the pressure will intensify and who knows, Rangers might have called it right. But if it goes the other way, Newcastle win and Mitrovic hits the ground running then QPR might find United bowing out of the race – for now at least. Either way it seems a strange way for a transfer that might be seven months in the making to reach its conclusion in such an arbitrary way.

The injection of chaos theory into these final frantic weeks of the summer is another narrative to consider. Newcastle might look better off, but there’s still so much water to pass under the bridge. It’s a vital four weeks and this summer could still go either way.