Cabella Finally Looks Like Marquee Man
Alan Pardew went from thanking himself for signing Remy Cabella to claiming he wasn't ready for PL football. At Hull he backed up the stats that suggested otherwise...
"Everywhere you go, always take Cabella with you," sang the Newcastle fans watching a first away win since a magical November that saw Alan Pardew become the smuggest man to ever hold a Manager of the Month award. Pardew was clearly keener on that shiny award than he was on £12m signing Cabella, who he almost always took with him but often did not trust.
It seems a long time since Pardew publicly thanked himself (as well as Graham Carr, Lee Charnley, Mike Ashley and everyone on the board) for signing the French international, declaring in July: "He has flair but also real hard work and commitment. He will bring talent to St James's Park I hope our fans really enjoy."
By December, Pardew was saying that "he's not ready for the demands of this division yet", having started him just nine times in the Premier League and not trusted him for 90 minutes since September. He was no longer thanking himself for all the hard work that brought Cabella to Newcastle from Montpellier but instead suggesting that the man hailed in July as a 'marquee signing' was ideally suited to a substitute role.
Pardew cast around for other right-sided alternatives and often favoured the out-of-position but hard-working options of Yoann Gouffran and Moussa Sissoko. After promising flair allied with diligence from Cabella, Pardew decided that the Frenchman's work wasn't quite hard enough to justify the occasional bouts of flair. John Carver - with nothing to lose but an at-least-temporary job to gain - backed the flair and was rewarded with comprehensive victory at Hull.
But this was not a maverick move from Carver - Cabella is clearly Newcastle's most individually talented player even if tangible results have been scarce. Despite starting little more than half the Magpies' games, he has created more chances than any other player in that Newcastle squad, while only Sissoko has beaten more opposition players.
Against an admittedly terrible Hull, he completed all six of his attempted dribbles as well as scoring a wonderful goal. As an added bonus, nobody on the pitch made more tackles than Cabella; now that's the kind of performance Pardew was prematurely thanking himself for.
The underwhelming appointment of Carver and the publicly stated goal of a top-half finish has been read as tacit admission from Newcastle that this season will be allowed to drift to its inevitably mid-table conclusion; it's only the promise of Cabella singing like a bird released that could make the next four months bearable.
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