SINCE the start of last season, Newcastle United have played five Premier League matches with neither Alexander Isak nor Callum Wilson in the starting line-up. They have not won any of them.

So, while Eddie Howe will understandably talk up Anthony Gordon’s efforts as a makeshift ‘number nine’ in the last couple of matches and attempt to play down the impact of being without both of his frontline forwards, the reality is that Newcastle desperately need either Isak or Wilson to be available when they resume after the international break with a home game against Brighton. Preferably both.

We can discuss tactical nuances, the balance of the Magpies’ midfield three or the form of the club’s wide attackers until we are blue in the face, but the reality is that none of that really matters if there is not a centre-forward on the field. For all its various complexities, football is essentially a simple game. You have to put the ball in the net. And the reality is that, without Isak or Wilson, Newcastle find that a struggle.

“You’re always going to miss your strikers if they’re not fit,” conceded Howe, in the wake of his side’s goalless draw with Everton. “If you take any focal point number nine out of a team, you’re going to miss them.

“I think the two that we’ve been missing are top players. They’re both different, of course, but I think you could see there were elements of our game that were just slightly missing. The spark was missing, and I think in part that’s down to them.

“Would we have won that game with them? It’s very difficult for me to give absolute clarity and certainty to that. But my belief is we’d have a much better chance with them available.”

All of which shines an unforgiving spotlight on the summer decision to spend an initial £10m on William Osula in the summer, a striker Howe clearly deems to be a long way off the level that is required for the Premier League. The Magpies boss was willing to turn to Osula against League Two opposition in the shape of AFC Wimbledon last week, but when it came to needing to enliven a game that looked destined to finish as a goalless draw long before the final whistle blew at the weekend, it was telling that he kept the 21-year-old on the bench.

Howe has previously explained that, with Isak and Wilson in the squad, it is hard to justify spending huge sums on a proven striker who is not guaranteed to play. If you’re signing a forward for £60-70m, in the shape say of a Dominic Solanke, they’re going to expect to be the undisputed number one.

That’s fair enough. But that shouldn’t rule out the purchase of a player who is at a much more advanced stage of his development than Osula appears to be, or who offers a much better chance of making rapid progress. How did Aston Villa manage to get Morgan Rogers out of Middlesbrough for £15m when Newcastle should surely have known all about him, given that he was playing just down the road? What about Ipswich’s £15m purchase of Liam Delap, a striker who has now scored four goals in his last five Premier League matches?

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There have been forwards out there in the last 12 months – Newcastle just decided not to pursue them, opting instead to gamble money they can ill afford to lose on an unproven youngster who could turn out to be something special, but who is currently deemed to be a long way off first-team levels. In hindsight, they would have been much better holding on to Chris Wood rather than shuffling him off to Nottingham Forest for £15m.

Ifs, buts and maybes. But as Darren Eales has openly admitted, the constraints of the Premier League’s Profit and Sustainability rules mean every penny is crucial to the Magpies. In the final third at least, their recent transfer decisions have been baffling.

Things were better at the other end of the field on Saturday night, with a first Premier League clean sheet since the opening weekend of the season at least ensuring Newcastle took a point from what is likely to be their final visit to Goodison Park.

In part, that clean sheet owed much to the limitations of Everton’s attacking, with Sean Dyche’s side eschewing the modern trend of assiduously retaining possession and patiently playing out from the back in order to launch a series of aimless long balls into Newcastle’s final third. Dominic Calvert-Lewin tried valiantly to do something with them, but Dan Burn and Fabian Schar did a decent job of keeping him at check.

At the other end, Newcastle’s dominance of general play never really translated into a succession of goalscoring chances. There was the missed penalty of course, with Anthony Gordon’s poor spot-kick being saved by Jordan Pickford – for what it’s worth, Gordon was surely the right choice of taker given that he had scored from the spot against Manchester City just seven days earlier – and the makeshift ‘number nine’ also blazed over when released into the 18-yard box late on. For much of the rest of the game though, passes went astray and Newcastle’s collective decision-making in the final third left a lot to be desired.

“It was the best we’ve been in the first two-thirds of the pitch,” said Howe. “We controlled the game and created the moments. It was just that the final ball was off. The final action was off, and the individual actions were off in that attacking area. That’s the frustration. We had the defensive part there, but we didn’t have the attacking part.”