OPINION
In many ways the announcement of Saturday’s team news for Newcastle United was always going to be a little bit make or break for Mo Diame.
The Senegalese midfielder requires 25 starts this season to be awarded a new contract extension on Tyneside, and currently sits on 22, as reported in the Chronicle.
A spell on the sidelines and the advent of Isaac Hayden and Sean Longstaff, plus the imminent returns of Jonjo Shelvey and Ki Sung-yeung, have certainly not helped his cause, but the 31-year-old must still have been hoping that he could come back into the Toon Army’s side and push himself closer to a new deal.
Instead, Diame found himself out of the squad entirely, and that can only spell trouble for the imposing midfielder.
Huddersfield Town have their own battles to fight, but given how abjectly dire they have been for large swathes of this season, you would assume that if there was one game Rafa Benitez would have trusted his man to come back in for, it would have been against the lowly Terriers.
Now, however, with a raft of options ahead of him in the pecking order, and with a huge run of fixtures before them in the league, it is easy to see how Benitez might just ease one of his regular figures towards the periphery.
That would be gutting for Diame, who has arguably justified an extension to his current stay in the north east, but pragmatism rules under Benitez, and now he has 11 games to save his Toon career.