Nick Pope – A message to those who desperately wanted him replaced

Newcastle United start the new season with Nick Pope in goal.

1-0 win over Southampton despite having to play 73 minutes shorthanded.

With a clean sheet, Newcastle United secured a very important, some would say vital, three points.

Coincidence? I don’t think so.

For me Nick Pope is certainly one of the best and most important players of Newcastle United, maybe even the best and most important.

Just look at what happened last season without him!

It all seems a bit surreal and very strange, at least to me.

However, it is absolutely true that last season, at the start of the 2023/24 campaign, when Nick Pope was playing in every game and before he got injured, a very vocal minority of Newcastle United fans were insisting that he should be replaced.

Indeed, I have only just come across this article dated November 27, 2023, ironically just five days before Nick Pope suffered a devastating injury late in the win over Manchester United.

To spare the author embarrassment, I won’t mention his name, but the article was titled “James Trafford new number one and Nick Pope as reserve, looks good to me”…

This is an excerpt from an article from late November 2023:

‘Nick Pope is not and has not become a bad goalkeeper and I still have confidence in him for the rest of the season. Despite his shortcomings… But we need to make progress and I don’t think we can if he stays between the sticks in the long term.’

Working on Nick as James Trafford’s backup for next season (2024/25) seems like a good idea.

Quite astonishing. Not in a good way.

Those weird, over-the-top critics of Nick Pope desperately wanted someone who was better with his feet when on the ball to replace him.

Personally, I have always liked goalkeepers who could defend Newcastle United’s goal against a shot in the shape of a circle.

At the time of writing, Nick Pope has started the first 13 Premier League matches of the 2023/24 season and has conceded 14 goals. This makes it 14 goals conceded in 15 PL starts with a clean sheet against Man U on 2nd December 2023. Nick Pope’s final tally is 16 goals conceded in 15 PL matches in 2023/24, with Pope returning for the 4-2 win at Brentford on the final day of the season (in NUFC’s other 23 Premier League matches last season, Newcastle conceded a further 46 goals).

In terms of recent achievements, Nick Pope has now made 53 Premier League appearances for Newcastle United, conceding 48 goals.

If any Newcastle United fan has not yet realised the true value of Nick Pope, they never will.

And for all those Newcastle United fans who were convinced James Trafford was the obvious choice to replace Nick Pope at the start of the season…

Well, it arrived in the Northeast this weekend.

No, he’s not in the North East to sign for Newcastle United to replace Nick Pope as those stupid critics of NUFC have been demanding.

Instead he played second-tier football and picked the ball out of the net when Burnley lost to Sunderland.

Nick Pope, arguably Eddie Howe’s best signing to date, look at what other top clubs spend on goalkeepers, fortunes, yet English player Pope will only get £10 million in the summer of 2022.