Newcastle's Resilience Shines Despite Late Liverpool Equalizer

The board for stoppage time went up at St James’ Park: five minutes.

On the touchline, Matthias Jaissle started windmilling his arms, urging every last decibel out of the stands. The message was clear. One more surge. One more roar.

“Sing your hearts out for the lads,” came the response, rolling down from the Gallowgate.

Newcastle were 2-1 up on Liverpool. Nobody inside the stadium needed reminding that this fixture has a habit of twisting the knife late. Not here. Not with the ghosts of 1996 in the air, Stan Collymore’s winner, Kevin Keegan slumped over the hoardings, still part of the shared trauma of these two clubs.

On a night when Newcastle and Liverpool came together to celebrate Keegan, that memory felt very close to the surface.

Keegan’s family were in the directors’ box. So were some of his old lieutenants: Alan Shearer, Rob Lee, Tino Asprilla. Before kick-off, Wor Flags turned St James’ Park into a living mural, every seat wrapped in black and white, a huge banner in the Gallowgate carrying a line that could have been written for this very moment.

“I want people to dream about their football club. They should. We should all be dreamers at heart.

“Some people are the opposite and say, ‘We can’t do that’. But when you ask them why, they can’t give a reason. Well, I say, ‘Why not?’”

Those words still hang heavy over Tyneside.

A bruising year has stripped Newcastle of Alexander Isak, Anthony Gordon, Sandro Tonali and Bruno Guimaraes. Eddie Howe has gone too. In their place, a younger, untested group: every summer signing 24 or under, none of them with a minute of Premier League football before this season. Jaissle himself is learning the division on the fly.

Plenty expected them to stumble. Some said they’d be swallowed whole.

Jaissle heard it. So did injured captain Dan Burn, who has long cast Newcastle as their best selves when it feels like “us against the world”. That siege mentality crackled through the stadium, sharpened by the noise around Isak’s return and the sense that a new era needed a statement.

“If you have this synergy between the fans and then the players delivering on the pitch, something special can be created,” Jaissle said.

For long stretches, you could see what he meant. The intensity. The runs in behind. The grit, the pressing, the refusal to wilt.

No one embodied that quite like Amar Dedic. The right-back had only sealed his £30m move from Benfica on Tuesday, but he played as if he’d been here for years, snapping into challenges, driving forward, feeding off the noise.

Just as striking, though, were the players who looked reborn after difficult first seasons on Tyneside.

Anthony Elanga broke the deadlock with a sharp, low finish into the bottom corner, the kind of composed strike Newcastle thought they were buying last summer. Yoane Wissa, another who struggled to fully ignite last term, was everywhere. He set up Joe Willock’s second and spent the rest of the evening playing like a man on a mission.

The numbers told the story: Wissa, a forward, won more duels than any Newcastle player – 11 in total.

“The manager expects me to be a leader and lead the group,” the 29-year-old told Sky Sports. “He wants me to be winning balls, making sure everyone is going forward, going for the kill, and sometimes just be calm.”

Jaissle loved that performance. He still couldn’t resist pointing out the moment Wissa had the chance to “kill the game” and make it 3-1. That miss would linger.

Because the old flaw resurfaced.

No side in the Premier League dropped more points from winning positions than Newcastle last season – 27 in 2025-26. Howe admitted in May that “anything can happen” when asked if that habit might seep into the new campaign. It has, at least for now.

The warning signs were there as Liverpool pushed late on. The whistles from the home end grew louder with every red shirt that crossed halfway. The legs in black and white grew heavier.

Then came the final twist.

Liverpool worked one last attack. Victor Munoz, off the bench, drove into the area. Lewis Hall, exhausted, dangled out a leg. Munoz went down. Stuart Attwell pointed to the spot.

Jaissle ripped off his blazer in disbelief, furious at what he felt was a “soft” penalty. St James’ Park erupted, half in anger, half in dread. They’d seen this film before.

Dominik Szoboszlai stepped up, buried the penalty, and delivered that all-too-familiar late blow. Liverpool had their 2-2. Newcastle had their punch to the gut.

Afterwards, Jaissle took a long pause before he spoke.

“I cannot repeat everything because I could get in trouble and may need to pay some fines,” he admitted.

“But, overall, I told them that I’m really proud of what I saw over the 90 minutes. This is a really top starting point.”

He kept returning to that phrase: starting point. For all the frustration, he saw a team that didn’t fold.

“We were there for each other if something went wrong,” he said. “We acted like a unit. In such a short amount of time, this is a top starting point and the frustration was there as well, but these are the challenges we have now.

“With the pre-season, with the transition phase, it’s normal. Today someone threw stones in the way and we need to take that out to be successful again.”

Many home fans stayed behind to applaud. Not out of blind loyalty, but because they recognised something: the effort, the bite, the sense of a team trying to build itself in real time against elite opposition.

Keegan’s banner had asked, “Why not?”

On this evidence, Newcastle still have plenty of answers to find. But they also have something else: a manager unafraid of the fight, a group willing to run themselves into the ground, and a stadium ready to dream again, even when the old scars refuse to fade.