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This Newcastle United team are a complete mystery to me.

Hand on heart, I have no clue how this season will pan out. I change my mind by the hour.

I can’t put my finger on what is wrong, but something is. They are not bad players, so what is missing?

For a few weeks we played good football and picked up some decent points.

And then came Sunday.

As derbies go, it was one of the weirdest I have ever watched. It also ended up deeply disappointing.

We were so flat, so leaderless. We deserved what we got.

I didn’t enjoy it at all, and I don’t often say that about these fixtures, even the ones we lose.

Sunderland surprised Newcastle by starting with two men up front and the back two of Mike Williamson and Paul Dummett struggled.

To be fair to Steven Fletcher, he took his goal well and any team that goes behind so early in a derby is up against it. It took United 15 minutes to get any sort of composure and even then it was a listless performance.

We had a lot of possession, but for way too long did little with it. The equaliser came from nothing and at 1-1 it was our game to win. I was sitting there, fully expecting Newcastle to come up with another goal.

But there was nobody on the field driving them on. Nobody thought to give a team-mate a shout.

We could have done with a Kevin Nolan. He would have been in the faces of the other players reminding them of where they were and what was expected of them.

Instead, and this is the strangest thing of all, after getting back on level terms, the team as a whole sunk back into themselves.

I didn’t see any energy out there. I felt there was a real lack of pressure put on the Sunderland players. And I don’t know why Alan Pardew is going on about the free-kick that led to the winner. You could argue over whether it was a foul by Cheick Tiote, but Sunderland hardly scored directly from the set-piece.

The ball had to travel 70 yards from one side of the pitch to the other. Sunderland were able to move the ball from Jozy Altidore to Fabio Borini, without a single Newcastle tackle or anyone closing him down, the Italian hits a brilliant shot.

By the way, he couldn’t hit a barn door with a pea at Liverpool, and he comes up with a worldy!

Managers these days like to look back 10 passes to some incident to try and apportion blame.

Newcastle had plenty of time and opportunity to stop the goal and failed.

They badly missed Fabricio Coloccini and even Steven Taylor. They needed someone out there to take control and lead his men.

Newcastle are a quiet team. There doesn’t seem to be anyone within the ranks who even raise their voice.

I was especially disappointed with Loic Remy. In the summer, I was speaking to a scout who watched him almost every week when he was in France.

He told me that if Remy fancied it, he was unstoppable. If he didn’t, he was as useful as a piano player with the lid down.

Well he didn’t fancy it on Sunday.

Neither did Yoan Gouffran, and as for Moussa Sissoko, he is a man that needs to give himself a shake because his tendency to drift out of games is worrying.

If a neutral looked at that game on Sunday, they would suggest neither team was great and both would be in trouble this season. It is hard to argue with such an assertion.