Newcastle sign off remarkable season with battling draw at Chelsea

LONDON: Football, at its best, is able to tell a fairy-tale like no other game on the planet. The story of Eddie Howe, Jason Tindall and Newcastle United is near Oscar-worthy.

As the sun beat down from the crystal-clear London skies, to light up the Stamford Bridge dugouts, Eddie Howe, flanked by partner-in-crime Jason Tindall cut like shadowed, dream-like, movie stars, who'd just played a major role in this season's Premier League contender for performance of the year.

From clearing out dressing rooms and helping clean kits at Bournemouth, as the club sat in 92nd place out of 92 teams in the English Football League, days from going out of business, to strolling to the mega-bucks big leagues of Europe’s premier club competition.

All in a decade and a half's work for Howe & Co. It’s been some journey. Maybe, one day someone will make a film about their progress. I suppose, in many ways, Amazon already are. And what a watch it will be, with almost unrivalled success, the like of which has not been seen on Tyneside since the days of Sir Bobby Robson and Kevin Keegan.

This Newcastle team, and Howe with Tindall, deserve to be talked about in that company. They've earned that right. And in truth, it still feels like they're only just getting started.

This was one will not go down in the annals of history, it was very much an end-of-season affair in West London, but that mattered little. Nothing was on the line, the hard work already done. It's not often things have meant to little, of late.

With that in mind, and injuries biting, Howe made four changes to the line-up with Martin Dubravka and Anthony Gordon the key inclusions. One won man of the match, the other scored Newcastle’s only goal in the 1-1 draw. Very little