(Long) but good article about Sean Longstaff
Sounds like the club are fostering a really good environment for the players, not just splashing the cash:
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/s...ment-rdjwqsq2j
Sean Longstaff was having an early night in January and had been asleep for a couple of hours when he decided to check his phone. There were four missed calls from Eddie Howe. It was, he admits, a moment of real alarm.
“I’ve got a girlfriend,” says Longstaff. “She saw me looking at my phone and I was like ‘Oh no!’ and she was like ‘What?” And I said ‘It’s the manager!’ She hadn’t seen the stuff on the telly about me possibly going to Everton. When you miss a call four times, you’re like ‘What’s going on here?’
“If we play on a Saturday, his training sessions on a Tuesday and a Wednesday are really tough, so I got in, had food and pretty much went to sleep, and when I woke up, at about quarter to 11 [at night], my phone was buzzing.
“Honestly, I rang him and I said ‘Sorry, Gaffer.’ He just told me what was being said wasn’t true in terms of me going to Everton, and that I’d be staying — he was great. For him to ring me at that time was really important. It made our relationship stronger. He is the first manager I’ve had multiple conversations with on the phone.
“He’d been at the club for about a week when he came to me and said he hadn’t realised I was out of contract in the summer and he helped me through that period.
“Everything he says I trust. Everything he tells me to do, I’ll do, because I believe it’s going to make me a better footballer.”
It was the first week after Howe had taken over at Newcastle United, last November, that the new head coach stood in the can**** at the club’s training ground, with the entire Newcastle first team, and opened his heart to a group of players he had only just met. He told those men his life story, and since, they have told theirs.
“We have a fine session and at the end of the fine session, a player or a member of the coaching staff has to give a timeline of their life,” Longstaff adds.
“The gaffer did the first one, and he goes through his whole life, with pictures, and he talks about his family and he got emotional talking about it. He loved his dog and he spoke about that. I came out of the meeting and I was like ‘Wow, how can you not want to play for someone that’s willing to basically strip themselves bare and we’ve only known each other five or six days.’
“Of course, you’re emotional listening to him. I walked out of the meeting and I thought, ‘Whatever he wants me to do, I’ll do it.’ I’m sure everyone else in the team thought that as well. Then you go on to players, and you hear their story. Everyone is from a different place, some grew up in different countries. You get emotional listening to the other lads as well.
“Then I did mine and when you’re stood up in front of your whole team and the whole staff, they’re not looking at you as Sean the footballer and what he can do on a football pitch, they’re looking at you as a human, I remember doing a bit about my grandpa and my brother and my family and I got emotional and then the lads see that and it just brings you closer. It connects you on a totally different level and you can see that on a Saturday because everyone is fighting for each other and flying into challenges together and we just don’t want to let each other down. I’m sure that is massive, massive part of how we turned the season around.”
There is good reason for Longstaff to get emotional. At the age of eight he was spotted playing for North Shields Juniors and by the age of nine was training at Newcastle’s academy. He made his first team debut under Rafa Ben*tez at Anfield on Boxing Day in 2018, was lauded by Pep Guardiola when Newcastle beat Manchester City, scored against Blackburn Rovers in the FA Cup and Burnley in the Premier League and was coveted by Manchester United. His star rose quickly but then came a serious knee injury against West Ham United, a fight for fitness and then form and what he now calls a “dark period” followed as praise turned to criticism (He does not speak about Steve Bruce, the former Newcastle manager, but the relationship was poor).
Everything reached a head when he went out for breakfast in October 2020 with his dad, David Longstaff, a former ice hockey player who was capped 100 times for Great Britain, and his brother Matty.
“It’s weird. I still remember everything about it,” he says. “I remember the table we were sat on. I remember we’d had breakfast in Tynemouth. I could feel myself welling up at the table.
“My dad has always been tough on us, in a good way, he still is now, but he looked at me in a different way that day. We went upstairs at mine and he looked at me and kept looking at me and he didn’t really say anything and then he wasn’t looking at me like a dad who was going to talk about football, or take the piss, he was looking at me like a dad who wanted to know what was wrong.
“When he did that, I was like — woosh — I remember breaking down in front of him, bursting into tears. I was in a pretty bad way. My dad can be an intimidating bloke but he just grabbed me and squeezed me and said how proud he was of me. It was the first time I had got emotional in front of my old man. It was just a culmination of everything crashing down on me in that moment.
“What made me feel down? You go from wanting to play every week to not really playing, when you come in, instead of playing, you feel you have to set the world alight. It’s a difficult time. The team wasn’t in a great place. Everything around the club was negative. You get caught up in that if you’re the one coming through meant to try and help everything. You become one of the targets, I would say.
“Me being from Newcastle growing up and going to watch, you would see things written or said about you and it used to kill me inside. Everyone used to think I was great, and now this.
“I remember when it was spiralling, in the middle of it you think, it’s not too bad, it’s not too bad, but it changes you as a person. I look back and it was a pretty bad period to be around me. For my family, the people closest to me, they are who you take it out on. You can’t go and argue with every single person who says something horrible about you. That’s not how it works.
“About a day later, I got a text from Matt Ritchie and a telephone number of a psychologist. ‘Do this. You need to speak to him.’ ”
So he did.
“I felt a little nervous calling him. You think, ‘What’s he going to think?’ and you’re opening yourself up to someone you’ve never met and you feel vulnerable, but then you wonder why you didn’t do it earlier.
“I always say, if someone says they don’t think Lionel Messi isn’t very good at football or they don’t think LeBron James is good at basketball, or they don’t think [highly of the American football quarterback] Tom Brady — and he’s the big one for me — then of course they’re going to have something bad to say about Sean Longstaff!.”
The big picture became the little pictures.
“It’s about small building blocks,” he says. “He’d talk about little things before training sessions. He’d say, see if you can get a couple of compliments today. Something as little as that. You’d come off and it would happen and you’d be like ‘Aah, I achieved my goals for today’ and if you do that over a prolonged period of time then eventually you’re going to have to force someone’s arm and they will have to give you a chance.
“Everyday I still do it. I set myself little targets, and the little targets will create something much bigger.”
By the time of that phone call from Howe, he was back in Newcastle’s team. In his 12 appearances from the turn of the year, Newcastle won eight times and drew once. At the end of May, Longstaff, now 24, signed a new contract to stay at the club he supported as a boy for at least three years.
“I felt good and I felt relief. Who knows where the club could be in three years’ time? It shows they will give me time to progress. I’m in such a better place now. I look for the positives in everything and that is a massive thing. To have the backing of the manager is such a good thing and I don’t have to worry about if I am here or not next season. Did I celebrate? I went round to my nanna and grandpa’s house and we had a family barbecue.
“We want to build on last season, when we finished 12th, like what I was told, build slowly, and for me I want to play as much as I can. I’m not a kid anymore. I’ve been through a lot in the last four years. I want to be playing every week. I want to kick on and be one of the main players in the team this season.”
