Livramento ensures Newcastle enjoy their day in the rain against Wolves

As torrential rain cascaded down on a chilly Tyneside afternoon, it became ever easier to understand why Saudi Arabia’s tourism ministry believes holidays in its new Red Sea Coast resorts will ultimately sell well in north-east England. If that grand project still seems slightly fanciful, the prospect of Eddie Howe delighting Newcastle’s Saudi owners by taking his team on another European tour looked a lot more realistic at 5pm than it had done two hours earlier.

By the final whistle, Newcastle had leapfrogged Wolves to rise to seventh place in the Premier League, well within reach of a Europa League berth. Almost equally importantly, their first home win and League clean sheet of 2024 had gone a long way towards restoring recently ebbing faith in their defensive capabilities and Howe’s coaching nous.

Despite enjoying plenty of first-half possession Wolves were two goals down by the interval. When the impressive Fabian Schär and Anthony Gordon initiated a counterattack, the accelerating Alexander Isak was in the right place at the right time to head Bruno Guimarães’s deflected cross beyond José Sá.

When Jacob Murphy crossed low from the right and Sá and Max Kilman, suffered a total collapse in defensive communication, the goalkeeper could only parry the ball into Gordon’s path and watch in mortification as a winger, doing more than anyone to destabilise Wolves, swept the ball home.

After conceding 12 goals in their past four league games, Newcastle had turned uncharacteristically cautious and it appeared to be paying dividends. Howe had choreographed his team in full-on away team parking the bus mode and this contain and counter approach succeeded in thoroughly confounding their increasingly exhausted-looking guests.

With Guimarães having a fine game in central midfield and the tone-raising Joe Willock showing how much he has been missed during a lengthy injury lay-off, Wolves were up against it. Gary O’Neil replaced Sá and Pedro Neto with Daniel Bentley and Nathan Fraser at the interval but although the visitors improved and Martin Dubravka made some decent second half saves the new faces failed to change the narrative sufficiently.

By way of emphasising that point, Tino Livramento, on for the injured Kieran Trippier, contributed a fine late solo goal, cutting inside and sashaying beyond a trio of wrongfooted defenders after being cued up by Schär.

Despite the weather, Newcastle suggested they may just have put their bleak midwinter behind them.