When Alan Pardew, but ultimately Mike Ashley who holds the strings to the purse, failed to replace the likes of Andy Carroll, Jose Enrique, Kevin Nolan and Joey Barton, to the tune of what they amassed in departing – just over £40m – some fans hadn’t quite factored in what Yohan Cabaye, a continually improving Cheick Tiote, Demba Ba and an out of position Ryan Taylor could offer an Alan Pardew team that isn’t afraid of gung-ho attacks against the most unlikely of opponents.
However, it is that attitude and those players who saw Newcastle rise as high as a point off of second placed Manchester United after 9 games and now see Newcastle in 6th place and only 4 points off of Champions League football, after a winning start to 2012 with victories over Manchester United, 3-0, and a 1-0 win against Mark Hughes’ Q.P.R.
Now, with January already into its second half and transfers starting to take effect, the reinvestment of the Andy Carroll signing alone is almost complete: joining the summer signings of Demba Ba, Yohan Cabaye and Davide Santon, amongst others, is Senegalese striker Papiss Demba Cisse. Signing for £10m, from Bundesliga side Freiburg, Cisse not only joins on a five-and-a-half-year contract, but he signs a contract that sees him form a deadly duo his international strike partner Demba Ba.
Alone, Ba is currently in his richest vein of form for the Tyneside club: with 15 goals in his last 15 appearances for The Maypies, the former fellow Bundesliga striker won the Premier League’s Player of the Month Award for December and left his club for the Africa Cup of Nations will one goal in three in a 3-0 demolition of Manchester United, which also saw him earn the free-kick for Yohan Cabaye’s goal.
Together, they form a strike force that is the beacon of a fledging Senegal side inspired by youth, vibrancy and most importantly, attack. For Senegal, since 2008, a transition has been underway: an embarrassing performance in that edition of the biennial tournament, the nation’s 11th and last appearance, and a failure to qualify for the World Cup 2010, forced the Fifa-appointed Normalisation Committee, then running Senegalese football, to fire Lamine Ndiaye.
It had been a tough 10 month stint for the former Senegalese international: Henri Kasperczak resigned halfway through their, what BBC’s African football correspondent Piers Edwards described as, “disastrous” Cup display, and Ndiaye was left to finish the job in Ghana and then attempt to regroup a team among footballing unrest – 30 Senegalese football federation members stepped down after Senegal’s appalling performance in Ghana – in time for their World Cup qualifying campaign, despite not being able to fully assess the players available to him due to the difficulties imposed due to the running of Senegal’s footballing federation.