WHEN Eddie Howe was asked about the decision to sign William Osula rather than a more experienced striker in the summer, he provided an eloquent explanation about the difficulty of recruiting a proven forward when you already have two available.

At the time, his words just about made sense. The problem, of course, is that they only apply if you actually have two centre-forwards capable of making it onto the pitch. And for the whole of the season so far, that hasn’t been the case at Newcastle United.

Eight games in – ten if you count the two matches in the Carabao Cup – and Callum Wilson still hasn’t kicked a ball for the Magpies. He’s back in training, but as Howe admitted both before and after Saturday’s home defeat to Brighton, which saw Newcastle fail to score from open play for the third league game in a row, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s ready to actually play in a game. And even if he is, who knows how long he'll be able to stay fit for.

Harsh? Maybe a little given that anyone can get injured, and at the age of 32, Wilson is unlikely to be as robust as he was a decade or so ago. Even so, though, it’s hardly unfair to suggest that Newcastle were always going to be treading on dangerous ground if they were pinning their attacking hopes on a player with Wilson’s recent injury record. You didn’t need a crystal ball to wonder if the striker might end up spending more time on the treatment table than the training pitch.

Wilson managed just nine Premier League starts last season, and you have to go back to January and February 2023 to find the last time when he was available to start more than three league matches in a row. Last season, in 22 of Newcastle’s 36 league games, one of either Wilson or Alexander Isak was missing because of injury or illness.

So, while Newcastle might have two proven strikers in theory, the reality is that on any given weekend, there’s a likelier chance than not that at least one of them will be unavailable. Reasonably regularly, as was the case in the recent matches against Manchester City and Everton, neither of them will be able to play.

Clearly, that’s a massive problem. If Newcastle are missing both Wilson and Isak, Anthony Gordon can play as an emergency striker, but that’s a square peg in a round hole solution that doesn’t really play to the winger’s strengths. And even when Isak is available, you get situations like Saturday, when Howe desperately needed an alternative attacking option to change the course of a game that was slipping away from his side, but only felt comfortable throwing on Osula in the 92nd minute.

Even given the reluctance to spend big money on a striker this summer, the decision to commit £15m to the signing of Osula, a completely unproven youngster that Howe clearly feels is not Premier League-ready, was baffling. There simply had to be better options available.

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That’s in the past now, though. January offers an opportunity to do something different, and after countless spells of prevarication in previous windows, this has to be the time when Newcastle finally address their attacking issue.

First and foremost, that means biting the bullet and giving up on Wilson. True, the veteran could roll back the years in the next month or so, banging in goals as he returns to the fold. Even if he does though, that won’t change his contract situation – he is due to become a free agent in the summer – or the justified concerns over his injury record.

If Newcastle are serious about moving forward and genuinely challenging the teams at the top of the table, they cannot keep on handing out new contracts to the players who were helping them scrap against relegation the best part of a decade ago. Wilson has been a superb servant, but extending his stay on Tyneside would be a regressive move.

Howe appears to be torn on the issue, with his loyalty to those who have helped him in the past one of his Achilles heels. The Newcastle boss regularly bemoans how difficult it is to replace current members of the squad with players of a similar, let alone higher, quality, yet seeking to stand still is no way to grow a football club. The time has come to let Wilson go, with January providing the final opportunity to secure a fee for his services if the decision is made not to offer a new deal.

Then, once Wilson departs, Newcastle need to get serious about improving their attacking department. Not with the addition of another Osula, a long-term development project that might or might not pay dividends in the future, but with a proven centre-forward who can genuinely challenge Isak and make an immediate impact on the starting XI.

There should be £70m in the kitty after Crystal Palace stood firm on Marc Guehi, with Darren Eales having strongly suggested that the move to a new accounting period in the summer eased much of Newcastle’s PSR worries and paved the way for increased investment in future windows.

It is time to release that investment and spend some money. By January, it will be two years since Anthony Gordon arrived from Everton, and in that period, the signing of Sandro Tonali was the only point at which Newcastle acted like a big club in the transfer market.

That has to change. Sell Wilson, buy a proven international-class striker. Benjamin Sesko, Jonathan David, Viktor Gyokeres. The players are out there. It won’t be easy to sign them, and it won’t be cheap. But it is time for Newcastle to get serious about the state of their attack.