Burnley’s George Boyd thwarts Newcastle with late goal to grab point
John Carver’s audition for Alan Pardew’s old job concluded with a smattering of boos and two dropped points. The jeers were a little harsh on a day that could hardly have provided more entertainment, albeit some of it of the slapstick variety, but the caretaker’s increasingly anxious expression betrayed the reality that this was far from a vintage Newcastle United performance.
With Danny Ings and George Boyd impressing, Burnley, surely a decent bet to avoid relegation, fully merited the draw and possibly more at the end of a day in which an uncharacteristically slapdash performance on Fabricio Coloccini’s part threatened to cost Newcastle, and Carver, dear.
Steven Taylor was, contentiously, far from a certain starter under Alan Pardew but Carver recalled him alongside Coloccini at centre-half and he swiftly made his mark at both ends.
First Taylor prompted chants of “we’ve scored from a corner” when he rose above Jason Shackell to head Jack Colback’s corner past Tom Heaton. Scoring from such set pieces has become so much of a rarity for Newcastle that it was something of a collector’s item but Carver’s celebrations proved short-lived.
The caretaker watched in horror as Burnley launched a long punt upfield and Taylor merely succeeded in heading back, rather fiercely, towards Jak Alnwick. Whether in an attempt to cushion that ball or hoping to clear, Paul Dummett then intervened with his own head only to see his effort loop beyond Alnwick before settling in the back of the net.
Sean Dyche had limbered up for his trip to Tyneside by taking his family to watch Cinderella and, as that equaliser from the home left-back flew in, Burnley’s manager must have felt he was back at the pantomime.
Up in the stands the joke that Dummett must be the only Geordie who does not know where Alnwick is (for those unfamiliar with the north-east it is a town in Northumberland) quickly did the rounds.
A similar comedic moment, in the first minute, had seen Cheik Tioté, increasingly unreliable these days, carelessly concede possession to Danny Ings. It preceded a pass to Ashley Barnes that resulted in Barnes unleashing a curling shot that rebounded back off the inside of a post.
After that it was mainly Newcastle and Carver will have felt reassured by his team’s quick reaction to Dummett’s own goal. Played in by Daryl Janmaat’s short pass, Colback’s crisp, long-range, left-footed shot brushed the inside of an upright as it defied Heaton.
The sense that it was not Dyche’s day seemed compounded by Burnley’s appalling luck with injuries. By the 36th minute the visitors had used up their full complement of substitutes with Shackell and Dean Marney having hobbled off before Kevin Long, who had replaced Shackell, required lengthy treatment on the pitch before being carried off with a leg in a splint.
Theories that fate was working against them heightened further when, shortly after George Boyd had come mighty close to equalising, Danny Ings’s stellar, subtly swerving, shot bounced back off the underside of the bar before Barnes’s header from the rebound struck a post.
Across in the technical area, Dyche’s almost disbelieving grimace suggested he had just been subjected to a particular barbaric form of torture. It got worse.
When Coloccini, suddenly enduring a wobbly second-half spell, erred, Ben Mee directed a close-range header against the bar.
By now Dyche was reduced to shrugging but a genuine smile returned to his face when Ings connected with Mee’s cross to claim a richly deserved headed equaliser. With Newcastle’s first-half superiority a rapidly receding memory, there was a feeling of growing inevitability about a goal that arrived shortly after Alnwick had performed wonders to tip Boyd’s 35-yard shot over the bar.
Not for the first time this season it required Moussa Sissoko to come to the rescue, the much admired France midfielder polishing off a rare home counterattack by lashing Ayoze Pérez’s cross out of Heaton’s reach.
There remained no cause for Geordie complacency – and particularly with Ings showing off the touch and movement which had made Pardew so keen to sign him. Boyd too was enjoying a good game. That pair combined to deflate Carver’s new year when Boyd met Ings’s pass before surging through the home defence and beating Alnwick with a low shot that Newcastle’s third-choice goalkeeper should arguably have saved.
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