Newcastle United reaching crisis point as ghost of Mike Ashley’s past returns in Everton boss Sam Allardyce

Newcastle have lost six of their last seven games

Benitez is facing a relegation battle despite a strong start to the season (Getty)

Six defeats in seven. Rafa Benitez may insist he is not surprised by Newcastle United ’s current run, but the support is.

Newcastle were fourth in September. Now they are a bad night away from a relegation place.

For the first time, Benitez has been questioned by pockets of the club’s fans; tactical changes, the overlooking of the much-hyped Aleksandar Mitrovic and a summer transfer window spent hunting for bargains, has seen alarm and then criticism.

Lost in that is the inexperience of his side. The manager thinks his squad is too young. The top Premier League scorer at his disposal is Dwight Gayle, who has 18, although the player’s recent run - three in his last four games - has been a course of optimism largely lost in the recent malaise.

To add to the mix, Benitez will face a long-term foe in the new Everton manager Sam Allardyce on Wednesday night. The Newcastle winger Christian Atsu has already called it “must win”, and while that particular phrase is overused, it does feel like a huge game and a huge moment.

Allardyce was the first manager sacked by Mike Ashley as Newcastle owner, back in 2008. For that, he received a pay-off of £4.5m. He has not, however, forgotten how the support turned on him.

“The Newcastle job is impossible to turn down, but believe me, it’s also an impossible job to do,” he said in subsequent interview about the period. “You start to wonder whether the club will ever actually get things right. The demand for success is so great and needs to be achieved so quickly that the manager comes under threat quicker there than anywhere else.

“The pressure becomes so great that literally all that matters is the next result and, really, a football club cannot live like that.

“I had a three-year plan in place but I also wanted to rebuild the club from top to bottom. That plan was in place but in came Mike Ashley and it all fell apart after six months. It was a bitter experience for me.”

Allardyce, perhaps pointedly, said that Ashley did not give him the money to spend in the summer of 2007 that he had been promised by the former chairman Freddy Shepherd.

On this, at least, he will find empathy from Benitez, who is still angry about what happened in the summer transfer window of 2017, 10 years on, and unhappy about the uncertainty as to what will happen next month.

Benitez’s own position will be in further doubt if the Ashley/Staveley takeover limbo denies him the funding the side needs during that window.

Alan Shearer, who was not afforded a phone call about his position following relegation in 2009, is a vocal critic of Ashley.

He said on Monday: “I spoke to him (Benitez) before the season started and he was pretty frustrated in that he hadn’t been given what he thought he was going to get. They have a world-class manager in Rafa. I hope he’s given the tools to be able to show that.”

Benitez spent around £40m in the summer, Gylfi Sigurdsson cost Everton £50m. The jump for a newly-promoted side is becoming extraordinarily difficult. Huddersfield and Brighton are also fighting for survival.

That context, however, is largely lost in Newcastle, where memories of European football still abound.

It is arguable that four of the outfield players - Andros Townsend, Georginio Wijnaldum, Daryl Janmaat and Moussa Sissoko - who played in the final game of Newcastle’s relegation season in 2016 would get a game in the current team. Benitez has repeatedly warned, even when the club went fourth in September, that this was going to be a struggle.

He has at least managed to help Gayle rediscover his goalscoring form. That could alter a January in which Benitez currently admits he may have to target loan signings. Newcastle have not fared well when searching for strikers in the winter window - Shefki Kuqi (2011) and Seydou Doumbia (2016) failed to score a single goal between them.

Instead Newcastle must shore up a defence that has creaked alarmingly since shipping four at Old Trafford on November 18. The side has conceded 15 goals in the last five games, The return of Jamaal Lascelles against Everton may move towards solving that problem, but as Benitez is finding, at St James’ Park, there are always plenty more to solve.