Eddie Howe could not hide his frustration after Newcastle United missed a golden opportunity to finish fifth in the Premier League with a 0-0 draw with bottom club Wolves.
Newcastle knew that a win by more than one goal would see them rise above Manchester United in the table and into a potential Champions League spot, but they failed at Molineux.
The Magpies did not have a single shot on target until Jose Sa made a relatively routine double save to deny Bruno Guimaraes and Joelinton in the 85th minute.
Their total twelve attempts – ten of which missed the target – had an expected goals value (xG) of 0.88, and they have now drawn four goalless draws in the Premier League this season.
That is four times as many as during the previous two campaigns combined (one in 2024-2025, none in 2023-2024).
“We tried to win that game until the end,” Howe told Sky Sports afterwards. “It was a game of frustration for us.
“They played very low and minimized space, and we had to have the intention to win the game.
“We had a lot of ball possession. I thought we didn’t do enough with it; we lacked sharpness. But I thought we played better the longer the game went on.
“I thought there were moments for us, there were opportunities that we didn’t take. You look for an individual moment from a player who can make the difference, or a set play, just something that brings us to life.”
“We had the chances, even until the end. Bruno had a few moments, Joelinton had a few moments, but it just didn’t go for us.”
Newcastle attempted 34 crosses during the match – the fourth most in a Premier League match in 2025/26 – but only ten of them found their target, and Howe says they did not show enough quality in the big picture.
“I thought we put a lot of crosses in the box today, maybe we didn’t fill the box well enough,” Howe added.
“There were a lot of balls going over the goal, good crosses from high with no one on the end. I’ll have to look at a few of them to see if our positioning could have been better.
“But on a day when we had so much possession, we look at individual moments and with the quality we have, we should do better.”
Wolves, meanwhile, have become the first team to go four Premier League games unbeaten while at the bottom of the table since their arch-rivals West Brom did so in 2018 (five games in April and May), although they still appear doomed to relegation, sitting fourteen points behind 17th-placed Nottingham Forest.
But boss Rob Edwards saw green signs of recovery even before results started to turn around, telling BBC Match of the Day: “It was a really committed performance.
“People will look at the results and think it suddenly clicked, but the achievements were there before.
“They have very good players, but overall the match went as we expected. I’m very happy with the clean sheet; we didn’t give too much away.”
“We are not there yet; we understand that there is still a lot of work to be done. The boys are there, the crowd was with us throughout the match. We are making some good steps forward.”
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