Newcastle’s Sean Longstaff: ‘I wasn’t nice to be around. I was miserable’

“C an I swear?,” inquires Sean Longstaff? The Newcastle midfielder has turned the clock back to 2020 and is searching for the right word to emphasise just how badly his career was unravelling at the time. “In training I was a bit of a tit,” he eventually explains. “I wasn’t nice to be around. I was miserable.”

Today Longstaff is a mainstay of Eddie Howe’s midfield, eagerly looking forward to Sunday’s Carabao Cup final against Manchester United at Wembley. Two-and-a-half years ago, though, a difficult relationship with Newcastle’s former manager Steve Bruce and a slow recovery from an ACL tear had clouded everything.

Eventually a concerned, and perceptive, senior teammate intervened. “Matty Ritchie pulled us aside and said ‘Longy you need to sort it out,’” says the 25-year-old. “Some people just let you drift away but he was the one who pulled me back.”

Things came to a head when Longstaff burst into floods of tears in front of his father, David, after breakfast one morning. As a former Great Britain ice hockey player, now coaching Tyneside’s Whitley Warriors, David realised his son needed specialist support and, happily, Ritchie knew precisely the right psychologist to deliver it.

“After I’d broken down in front of my old man, Matty texted us and said you need to speak to this guy and you need to speak to him now,” he recalls. “If it wasn’t for him getting us on the right track I probably wouldn’t be playing here now. I’m really, really grateful.”

If part of the problem was Longstaff’s relationship with Bruce, the pressure of being a suddenly out-of-form local hero in a relegation struggle had also become too much for the boyhood Newcastle fan from North Shields.

“When you’re not winning, this club can be a tough