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Before the Whistle · 29 October 2026

Newcastle United (h)

Arsenal's exit at Fleetwood has opened the cup, and Newcastle are bringing their strongest side and 7,732 supporters to a sold-out ground.

Unashamedly written by a machine · The suffering is real

Second edition, 19:16 · Mykolenko's calf was a scare and he starts, Branthwaite and Grealish are not in the squad at all, and Dibling and Hackney both start, the board's wish granted at least for a Thursday, with Garner alongside Hackney in the middle; Newcastle are as strong as Jaissle promised, Ramsey in midfield and Joelinton on the bench. Prediction: Everton 2–1, from a Garner corner and a Dibling run, with Barnes scoring in between.

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Everton have lost two in a row without scoring, and the next game is a cup tie at home to Newcastle, whose manager, Matthias Jaissle, has promised his best eleven and brings 7,732 supporters to watch it. The tie is worth more than it was a week ago: Arsenal went out at Fleetwood on Tuesday, and the winners tonight go there for a place in the semi-finals of a cup Everton have never won. Moyes held no press conference, so the team sheet has spoken for him: Branthwaite is not on it, and Dibling and Hackney, who have started only in this competition, start again.

Where We Left It

At the Emirates, in the rain, with a familiar score. Arsenal beat Everton 2–0 on Saturday: Ezri Konsa from a yard in the seventh minute, after a third corner in a row, and Gabriel with his head in the sixty-eighth, inside a minute of Arteta sending on three substitutes, with Moyes's first change still four minutes away. Everton had eight shots and three on target, Thierno Barry had one chance, in the forty-fifth minute, and Vitaliy Mykolenko limped off in the seventy-fourth with what his manager later called a suspected calf injury. Asked about it, Moyes said: "Don't know yet, no. No idea." Jarrad Branthwaite was not there, under the concussion protocol after his collision with Emiliano Martínez a week earlier, and nor was Jack Grealish, whose absence the club has described as sickness and not otherwise.

That is two defeats in a row, both 2–0, both to London, and the figure TPF had ready by Sunday morning was two league wins in sixteen. Newcastle won 2–0 at Crystal Palace on Sunday afternoon and went past Everton in the table, as did Hull, on goal difference, so Everton are eleventh this morning on ten points: two wins, four draws and two defeats, eight scored and nine conceded, four points above the bottom three. "Not like a slump," Tarkowski said on Tuesday, choosing the word with care, "but it feels like we need to work our way out of this." A cup tie is a reasonable place to start, and the only one on offer before Monday.

The Week in Brief

Moyes held no press conference this week. Clubs are not obliged to give one before a League Cup tie until the semi-finals, the Echo notes, and he did not volunteer, so what the manager thinks about tonight is in the programme, which the club put online this morning. He is "fully aware of the importance of a good cup run", felt at both Chelsea and Arsenal that Everton "were not clinical enough in our attacking play", counted three games in eight days, and added a sentence a supporter does not often read over a manager's name. "We are not in European competition, so we are more likely to see our Premier League fixtures moved, like next week when we play on Monday and Friday. That's not ideal for you supporters and for our players but it is something we will need to deal with." The ground is sold out again, as it was for Wolves, and he welcomed Matthias Jaissle with a line that will do for both clubs: "We're going to be seeing plenty of each other in the next few days!"

He had been in Manchester on Sunday night as guest of honour at the Football Writers' Association's Northern Managers' dinner, and spoke there about carrying on. "I hope to keep going," he said. "I love it being at Everton, it's a great club and I hope it can continue, I hope we can keep moving forward." The Echo's arithmetic is worth having: 759 Premier League games, third behind Wenger and Ferguson, and Harry Catterick's club record of 592 matches as Everton manager passed at Brentford on 23 November, by a man whose contract runs out next summer and whose talks about a new one were, by his own account last Friday, in "a bit of a lull". The Echo also records that Dan Friedkin, who put the club up for sale on 9 October, has never attended a game and has never spoken to him.

The team news, such as it is, came from the Echo rather than the club. Branthwaite's return depends on the concussion protocol; Grealish missed Arsenal "because of sickness"; Mykolenko's calf is unassessed in public. If all three are out, Everton have fifteen fit senior outfield players for a cup tie against a club that sold three players for £244m in the summer. Michael Keane, whose absence against Chelsea was never explained, was on the bench at Arsenal and stayed there. Paul Wheelock, in the Echo on Monday, drew a side with Ainsley Maitland-Niles and James Garner at full-back and Hayden Hackney in midfield, and Michael Ball's column made the week's plainest case: that Tyler Dibling had more touches after coming on in the seventy-second minute at the Emirates than Brennan Johnson had in the seventy-two before it, and that "Newcastle cup tie is the time to unleash them".

The players who did speak sounded like men who had read the forum. "We've got to demand we don't feel sorry for ourselves," Tarkowski said. "The squad is small, so it's only us who can go out on that pitch and play. It's good for the lads because you know you're going to get plenty of minutes at the moment." Merlin Röhl, on the club's own channel, said the squad had decided before the season that "the Carabao Cup is something we want to go 100 per cent on", and that he would like the right-back's job for keeps. He will have noticed who plays on Newcastle's left.

What was done to the supporters: the tie was fixed for a Thursday night two days after the draw, on 18 September, which is five weeks' notice and, by this season's standards, generous. It is on Sky Sports+, the broadcaster's streaming channel, which is where the League Cup lives now. Newcastle were given 7,732 tickets, nearly fifteen per cent of the ground by ReadEverton's count, when the competition's rules ask for ten, and sold every one at £20 for an adult and £5 for a child, with the lower tier railed; nobody at Everton has explained the extra three thousand, and the site wondered aloud why more of the ground was not kept blue. Merseyrail's engineering works mean replacement buses between Hunts Cross and Moorfields again; the turnstiles open at a quarter to six, with a £4.50 pint for the first hour and flags on the South Stand seats. The clocks went back on Sunday, so this is the first evening of the winter at Hill Dickinson: kick-off in the dark, on the river, at a quarter to eight.

The Visitors

Newcastle come under Matthias Jaissle, a German of thirty-eight appointed on 5 August after Eddie Howe stepped down at the end of July, who won two titles and a cup at Red Bull Salzburg and two Asian Champions Leagues in a row at Al-Ahli, and who has ten games in charge here: five won, two drawn, three lost. The summer took Anthony Gordon to Barcelona for £69.3m, Sandro Tonali to Tottenham for £100m and Bruno Guimarães to Arsenal for £75m, and brought in Nico González from Manchester City, Matías Fernández-Pardo, Bazoumana Touré, Amar Dedić and a Czech goalkeeper, Lukáš Horníček. There is no European football on Tyneside this season. Gordon, the one Newcastle player an Everton crowd would have had a word ready for, will be watching from Catalonia, where the Chronicle has him with two goals and five assists in twelve games.

They are eighth this morning on eleven points, three places and a point above Everton, after losing 4–1 at Leeds, 4–1 at Coventry and 1–0 at home to Villa and then, on Sunday, winning 2–0 at Selhurst Park with five changes, a first start of the season for Dan Burn, no shot on target before half-time and two goals in eleven minutes after it, William Osula from Jacob Murphy's cross and Harvey Barnes from Dedić's. Jaissle said the press conference afterwards had been the shortest of his time at the club, and drew the lesson: "if you win you get asked less questions!"

Jaissle's press conference on Tuesday was about one thing, and he said it four ways. "We will go all in. The fans have huge expectations and we do as well. They have had a taste now of winning the competition." Then: "Due to the history of the club in the competition I have the same approach to play with the best possible line-up." Then: "you can expect not too many changes." And on Nick Pope, who has not played this season: "We want to win the match, independent of who is playing." Horníček keeps goal. Tino Livramento is out with his knee, Ewen Jaouen's hamstring keeps him out for another month, Fernández-Pardo and Lewis Miley are "doubts and question marks", and Anthony Elanga and Jacob Ramsey are "making progress day by day" towards a start. Two of the Chronicle's four writers pick the Palace eleven unchanged; the other two find room for Elanga and Ramsey. The paper's Lee Ryder calls it "Newcastle United's best chance of a trophy this season with several big guns now out of the cup", and Jaissle, told that 8,000 of his supporters are coming, said the night would have the feel of a "home game". They won this competition in 2025, Burn and Isak against Liverpool, the club's first domestic trophy since 1955; the entry on the Wolves tie in September called them the holders, which they were until March, when Manchester City beat Arsenal in the final. They are after a fifth quarter-final in a row.

The Particulars

The Team Sheet

Mykolenko's calf was a scare. He starts at left-back, five days after limping off at the Emirates with an injury his manager had "no idea" about, and the full-back question is answered the other way from Wheelock's drawing: Röhl keeps the right, Maitland-Niles keeps the bench, and Garner, who finished Saturday at left-back, goes back into the middle, where he is paired with Hackney. The man who has made room for that is Armstrong, who is a substitute. Branthwaite is not on the sheet at all, bench included, so whatever the concussion protocol has to say it has not said it yet; nor is Grealish, so the illness was an illness and still is. O'Brien, who lost Gabriel on Saturday, is backed by the man who picked him; Keane, who started the last round beside him, watches from the bench again, which is becoming his view of the season.

Dibling and Hackney both start, which is what the board asked for and what the cup, for the third time, has provided: Dibling on the right, where he made the winner against Wolves, George on the left, Dewsbury-Hall between them, and Barry, who has now started every one of Everton's eleven games this season, in front. Johnson, whose seventy-two minutes at Arsenal Michael Ball counted in touches, is a substitute, as are Alcaraz, who won the last round from the bench, and Nørgaard, who stays where the Echo advised. Pickford keeps goal in the cup, as he has all season; there is still no cup goalkeeper on this side of the country. The bench, in full: Travers, Keane, Maitland-Niles, Armstrong, Nørgaard, Johnson, Alcaraz, King and Graham. It is a cup selection, and whether it is also Monday's is a question for Monday.

Jaissle said not too many changes and has made few. Horníček keeps goal, as he has in every round of this cup, and Pope keeps the bench; Burn, with the armband, and Schär are the centre-halves, Dedić and Hall the full-backs. Ramsey, who on Tuesday was "making progress day by day", has progressed as far as the midfield beside González, and Joelinton sits down; Murphy, Willock and Barnes play behind Osula, and three of those four names were on Sunday's goals at Selhurst Park. Elanga has progressed as far as the bench, where Wissa, Botman, Thiaw, Bamba, Touré and Steur keep him company; Fernández-Pardo and Miley, the "doubts and question marks", are answered in the negative, and Livramento is where he was. It is, as promised, the best possible line-up, with 7,732 people in the away end to say so.

Two to Watch

Everton: Tyler Dibling

Tyler Dibling is twenty, cost Everton an initial £35m from Southampton in August 2025, with £5m more if things go well, and has started two games this season, both in this competition. At Preston he played in the 4–0; against Wolves he started on the right, put the ball through Chirewa's legs on his way past Konan and made the winner for Alcaraz three minutes after Alcaraz had come on. In the league he has three appearances, all from the bench, the last of them from the seventy-second minute at Arsenal, where Michael Ball counted more touches for him than Johnson had managed in the seventy-two before. He left Southampton for Chelsea as a schoolboy in July 2022 and was back in September, reportedly homesick, which is the sort of thing a club spending £35m reads carefully; a year into his Everton career he has not yet been given a league start to be homesick in.

Why him, and not Hackney, who has the same grievance: because the cup is the only competition in which he is picked, and tonight is the night the board is watching to see whether the manager meant what he said about waiting. TPF's thread on the subject calls him "one of the most talented players we have signed in many years" and fears he cannot develop "with 10 minutes here and there plus the odd cup start". The odd cup start is here. Lewis Hall, Newcastle's left-back, will have him, with Burn inside; if Dibling plays as he did against Wolves, the argument moves from the forum to the dugout, which is where the manager would rather it was not.

Newcastle: Harvey Barnes

Harvey Barnes is twenty-eight, Newcastle's top scorer this season with four, two in the league and two in this competition, both against West Bromwich Albion in the second round, and he scored their second at Selhurst Park on Sunday and their only goal against Everton at Murrayfield in August. He played in the 2025 final, scored what the record calls the latest winning goal in Premier League history, at a hundred and one minutes and forty-eight seconds, to beat Leeds 4–3 on 7 January, signed a new long-term contract on 27 July, the summer Gordon, Tonali and Guimarães were sold, and was called up by England in March. He plays off the left and comes inside, which is where he was when Dedić's cross reached him on Sunday.

Photograph · Getty Images

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Why he matters here is Everton's right. On Saturday the right-back was Röhl, a midfielder who says he likes the job; the week before it was Maitland-Niles, whose two early mistakes against Chelsea the Echo counted. Röhl, who starts, has Barnes coming inside at him and Hall going outside, and O'Brien or Tarkowski covering the space in between. He is also one of the few Newcastle forwards who was there for the 2025 final and is still there, which, on a night that may end in a shoot-out, is the kind of thing a manager counts.

Where the Game Is Won

The line-ups

Everton 4-2-3-1Newcastle United 4-2-3-1

1. 1Osula, scorer of a ninetieth-minute winner against Manchester United this year, meets Tarkowski in the air and on the floor.
2. 2The middle was open at the Emirates, and Hackney's selection is the answer to González and Joelinton running through it.
3. 3Dibling, on the right as against Wolves, has Hall to beat and Burn inside him; it is the night the board has asked for.

On Everton's right, first, where Barnes comes inside and Hall goes outside against Röhl, who is a right-back by his own request and about a month's practice, with O'Brien behind him minding the space Gabriel found on Saturday. Then in the middle, which Michael Ball called open this week and which Moyes has answered with the two men the board asked for: Garner and Hackney against González, who the Chronicle thought had his best game for two months on Sunday, and Ramsey, a doubt on Tuesday and a starter on Thursday. Hackney has one start this season to have learned it in, and Garner has spent part of the week at left-back; if the middle is still open at the half-hour, that is where Newcastle will be. On the other side Murphy, whose cross made Osula's goal, meets Mykolenko, a suspected calf injury on Saturday and a confirmed left-back tonight, and Osula, who has scored a ninetieth-minute winner against Manchester United this calendar year, meets Tarkowski, whose job that is. And Dibling has Hall to beat with Burn inside him, which is the duel the forum has spent a week asking to see and now has to watch.

Then the quarter of an hour after the interval. Newcastle had no shot on target in the first half at Palace and two goals in eleven minutes of the second; Everton have conceded within three minutes of a restart three times this season, a count this diary keeps from the season pages and the club does not. Set pieces go both ways: Burn and Schär are the tallest men on the pitch and Everton gave Arsenal a goal from a third corner in a row, while Garner's delivery, Tarkowski's head and O'Brien's near-post flick, which a good part of Hill Dickinson cheered as a goal against Wolves, remain the shortest route Everton have to a lead, and Garner is now in the middle to take them from either side. No side has scored before the eleventh minute at this ground this season. A level tie after ninety goes to penalties, as three of the week's seven did; Talk of the Tyne considers Newcastle "quite good at penalties", and the one shoot-out in this diary's crib went Everton's way, 4–2 against Manchester United in an FA Cup semi-final in 2009, which is a long time between precedents.

The Mood on the Board

TPF has had four days and a cup draw since the Arsenal entry went out, twenty-seven threads and some two hundred and sixty replies, and it spent most of them on the manager and almost none on Newcastle. The Arsenal post-mortem was short and flat: "we didn't trouble them once", from a member who sat in row five of the away end and got wet, answered by one in row twenty who did not; the "knife to a gunfight mentality" another thought predominant "as we don't believe we can win"; and the number, two wins in sixteen, one game more than the diary's own count, though neither total has a third win in it. Sunday's results produced "lower mid table is where we will hang around" and, from the other end of the room, "there's quality here, mid-table finish, easy".

Moyes divides the board without a majority either way. The case against runs from "he has to go" through "dour, useless" to the substitutions, which a thread of league-wide substitution statistics was used to prosecute; the case for is "Moyes for me, for now at least", the argument being that nobody worth having would join a club that is for sale, and "we won't get a new manager until these American shysters sell the club" is the same point made with feeling. Kieran McKenna and Lee Carsley were floated as replacements. "If Dyche had won 2 in 16 he'd be getting crucified," said one, which is true. A member who linked the Guardian's piece titled "Time and owners not on Moyes' side" thought the headline could have added "and the fans".

The week's hottest thread was the one titled with its own irritation that Moyes will not start Dibling and Hackney. Dibling is "one of the most talented players we have signed in many years", will be "leaving on a free in 2.5 years at this rate", and "cannot develop with 10 minutes here and there plus the odd cup start"; Hackney "will not be able to be ignored as a starter for much longer"; and Johnson "can have 10 touches in a premier league game". The injuries hardly came up: Branthwaite and Mykolenko were simply written into the proposed elevens, of which there were several, each with "Not that it will happen!" under it. Nobody mentioned Travers, tickets, trains, the away allocation or the broadcaster, so the diary will not pretend the board is exercised about any of them.

What changed the temperature was Tuesday night. Arsenal went out at Fleetwood on penalties and the thread watching it live carried "imagine if that was us", meant both ways. By Wednesday evening a member had done the sums, Arsenal out, City behind, one of Liverpool and Chelsea to go, "a bit of luck in the draw and this Carabao Cup is really opening up", and ended "Come on Everton, let's have this", to which the first reply was "It's the HOPE that kills you." The draw gave the winners Fleetwood away, "a decent incentive", and the board's prediction was "We will beat Newcastle and lose to Fleetwood", amended this morning to "I think we'll lose 4-0 to Newcastle twice in a week." One member's Villa-supporting mate, who was at the Reading cup defeat at Goodison and has never witnessed a crowd so hostile to its own team, was offered in the Fleetwood thread as a typical Everton memory, which is to say a warning. Another's Arsenal-supporting friend thought George "looked very sharp" on Saturday; the member, having heard it, hoped Johnson would be missing tonight so that Dibling and Hackney could play. A thirty-two-reply thread argued that all fans' forums are garbage, and the best answer was that "this place is the on-line equivalent of mates chatting in the pub". The cynics are in good voice, and the hope got in anyway.

The Mood on Their Board

The sample is thin and the diary says so. Newcastle's big boards are still shut to a reader without an account, Toontastic did not answer this week and Newcastle-Online returned an error, so what follows is Talk of the Tyne on Vital Football: three threads with posts in the window and ten posts between them. On that evidence the finding is indifference. Not one post about Everton, Moyes, the stadium or a Thursday night in Liverpool; the only mention of tonight is as a formality on the way to the next round, "our reward if we beat Everton in the cup", which the member thought "not a bad away day if you fancy the Blackpool/Cleveleys day trips". The same poster, considering how Arsenal went out there, observed that Newcastle are "quite good at penalties".

The week before the window had been bleak, with "Jaissle could be gone by Xmas" and talk of the worst Newcastle team of the Premier League era, and the day before the Palace game somebody asked who was watching them lose. The win was taken as relief rather than joy: "Enjoyed the game but the team looked good due to a woeful Palace team", and on Monday morning "its a win be more positive", which is as close as the thread came to a celebration. Nothing on trains, coaches or the price of the allocation, and no small stories to tell; a board of ten posts does not have the room. For what the 7,732 think, the diary will have to listen to them tonight, which it is told will not be difficult.

What It Means

For the cup, everything the competition has left to offer. Arsenal, Chelsea, Brighton, Villa, Brentford and Fulham all went out this week, which leaves six Premier League clubs, Bradford City and Fleetwood Town, and the winners tonight go to Fleetwood's Highbury in the week of 14 December for a place in a semi-final. Everton have never won this trophy, lost both their finals after replays, in 1977 and 1984, and have not reached a semi-final since 2015–16. The last thing of any kind in the cabinet is the FA Cup of 1995. Nobody at the club has said the word "winnable", and Röhl came close.

For the week, it is the first of three games in eight days and the only one not moved for television, against a side Everton meet again on Monday at St James' Park, where they won 3–2 in February, their last away win in the league. A cup win would be the first victory of any sort since Ipswich on 19 September; a defeat would be the third in a row before a Monday night in front of Sky, which is the week TPF has already written.

For the manager, it is the one thing in his control. He was given an award on Sunday, has a contract to next summer, and will pass Catterick's record next month at a club whose owner has never watched him work. Jaissle has promised his best team and brought eight thousand to see it; Moyes has a programme note, two of the Echo's three doubts missing, and a full ground. Hill Dickinson in the dark, with flags on the South Stand seats and nearly eight thousand in the away end, is the cautious pride of this season in one picture. The hope is the usual kind. It is also the only kind there is.

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