Newcastle United lose to Hull City on penalties

It’s a frustrating loss, but one I can accept. The club played well, and ended with a hard fought result that just didn’t go our way. Now it’s time to simply focus on one thing.

Promotion.

Now that Newcastle United is out of the EFL Cup, Rafa Benitez will now be 100% focused on gaining promotion for the club. Benitez stated that if the club win, he’d have been proud of the result. If they lose (which they did) he would say that they weren’t ready for handling two tournaments at once.

It seems that the club just wasn’t prepared. And they showed it. With 21 shots, you would think that the club would have converted. But only seven of those shots were on target. You can’t convert shots to goals if you aren’t accurate.

Returning to net was Matz Sels who will undoubtedly face strong criticism following the loss on penalties. But hopefully fans realize that the lack of solid offense is why we got the result we did. No goals in the first two halves, as well as shoddy defense following Mohamed Diame’s goal.

I will defend Matz Sels until he has proven he was a complete flop. Until then, Matz Sels is a goalkeeper for Newcastle United, and should be treated as such. Respect, and understanding that he was in a tough spot today.

This loss is hard to take. Many were hoping that Newcastle would take this chance and turn it into a semifinal appearance. But it wasn’t meant to be. Rafa knows better than anyone what went wrong today. He’ll be sure to sort out the bugs.

But moving forward, promotion has always been, and will be until the end of the season the number one goal for Newcastle United. A hard fought win by Hull. They deserve to move forward. They now have more on their plate while fighting against relegation. Newcastle now has more time to focus on promotion.