Are Newcastle about to win something?

Newcastle United and winning something; call it the great obsession, call it a ferocious yearning, call it part of the psyche, call it the ultimate contradiction, call it whatever the hell you want, but it hasn’t happened, not since 1955 for a domestic trophy of any significance, which almost seems careless. And now, let them call time on it, which is precisely what Becky Langley’s women’s team intend to do this weekend.

Their shoulders do not bear the weight of 69 pot-less years — 55, if we take Europe and the now defunct Inter-Cities Fairs Cup as the starting point — and do not deserve to. Newcastle’s women’s team have their own context and history to draw upon, although there are some caveats here. With the women no longer an afterthought after officially being brought under the club’s ownership two years ago, it is now one enterprise. The big idea is that success and pain are shared.

Should Langley’s side lift the FA Women’s National League Cup at Premier League side Luton Town’s Kenilworth Road, where they face Hashtag United tomorrow (Saturday), it would mean something and stand for something. Since the takeover at Newcastle in October 2021, resources have been poured into the women’s operation; this season, they became the first team in the third tier of English women’s football to be full-time professional and they are on the verge of a second successive promotion.

“Winning a cup would be fantastic for the club,” says Su Cumming, Newcastle’s head of women’s football. “I think it would be very symbolic for the ownership to see their investment, their commitment to us, recognised.”

“Yeah, 100 per cent,” says centre-back Charlotte Potts. “That’s why I came back last season (after a near decade playing elsewhere) — to win trophies.”

“Our aim is to win but also to inspire the next generation of little lasses and lads who want to play football,” says Grace Donnelly, the goalkeeper.

There is something more opaque, too. Donnelly, Cumming and Potts all supported the Newcastle men’s team growing up, as did plenty of others. Tickets were hard to come by in the Sir Bobby Robson era, “but even just one memory as a child was enough to fuel your dreams. It was amazing,” Potts says. As a kid, Donnelly was obsessed with Shay Given, the former Newcastle and Republic of Ireland goalkeeper. “I used to get wrong off my mam and my dad because they’d spent all that money on a ticket and I’d just stand and watch him the full game.”

Midfielder Amber-Keegan Stobbs was brought up in south London, but her name tells a story; she was born in 1992, the year Kevin Keegan came back to manage the club at which his playing career had ended in the 1980s and a different Kevin, her father, was a rabid fan. During school holidays, they would visit her grandparents in Consett, County Durham, a 40-minute drive south of Newcastle, and then go to a men’s match. When she led the side out for their cup semi-final against Portsmouth at St James’ Park last month, an emotional Stobbs broke down.

Katie Barker, the No 9, has the same thirst for goals as Alan Shearer, her great hero, who joined his boyhood club for a world-record fee of £15million in summer 1996, shortly after Keegan’s side’s glorious, doomed tilt at the title. They finished second and did the same the next season after Keegan resigned in the January and Kenny Dalglish took over. They reached the FA Cup final in 1998 and 1999, where they ran aground against exceptional opponents in double-winning Arsenal and treble-bound Manchester United.

“Winning something isn’t easy,” Shearer says. “I won the Premier League with Blackburn Rovers and I know how much effort and dedication it took on behalf of an entire club. It wasn’t for the want of trying that it didn’t happen at Newcastle. It was always the aim and we went close a few times, but it never quite happened. I hope Becky and her players bring the cup home. They’ve been magnificent this season.”

The notion of Stobbs, as captain, lifting a trophy for Newcastle is put to her.

“Mad,” she says after some thought.

Could she please elaborate? “It’s mad,” she says.

Anything else to contribute? “It’s just mad.”

Stobbs rarely struggles for words, but the concept is overwhelming and closes her throat. How might that feel?

Stobbs was presenting football awards at an event for Northumbria University students this week alongside Steve Howey, one of Keegan’s great Entertainers. “When Kevin arrived, we were all just swept up in a hurricane,” Howey says. “We went up to the Premier League and we immediately challenged. You don’t have time to take a step back or analyse, but we knew we were good enough to win.” If not this year, then next… until the years ran out.

The moment that sent us to the final ➡️

Check out the highlights from a historic day at St. James’ Park 👇#NUFCWomen

— Newcastle United Women (@NUFCWomen) February 26, 2024

Post-takeover, under Eddie Howe’s management, the men’s team are competing once again. If this has been a draining season, undermined by injuries and often stretched to translucency by playing in four competitions, there have been rich highlights, too. During the 14 years Mike Ashley owned the club, Newcastle getting to a cup quarter-final was both rare and improbable. There have been two of them this season alone, plus six heady fixtures back in the Champions League. They are yearning again.

Thirteen months ago, Newcastle’s men returned to Wembley for the Carabao Cup final. Naturally, they lost, but perhaps that nature is changing. Perhaps it was the start. Cumming and a gaggle of the women’s team’s players were there that day.

“I’m a lifelong Newcastle fan but was never able to have a black-and-white shirt as a child because my parents didn’t agree with me playing football,” Cumming says. “I wanted to play, but I was of the age where it wasn’t allowed in school.

“Becky bought me my first-ever Newcastle shirt. It was after we’d played at St James’ for the first time in front of 22,134 people and that was the number Becky had put on the back. I got it framed. But I actually bought a shirt to go to Wembley because I’d never had that opportunity before. I loved it. It was great to wear a shirt.

“We drove down and saw all the scarves hanging out of car windows. I’m sure there’ll be more of that this weekend. As a passionate Newcastle fan, I’m privileged to be in this position.”

“A lot of the girls went to the men’s final last season and despite not winning, it was just such a fantastic day,” Donnelly says. “To hear the crowd backing them, to see the flags before kick-off and then again in the dying minutes of the game, to have that buzz, for the fans just willing them on so much… It was just fantastic to witness that, to be part of that.

“For us to have this cup run is just the cherry on top of the cake.”

Donnelly joined Newcastle in 2017 when team members either had to pay to play or seek out sponsorship. Potts rejoined in 2022, 11 years on from the start of her first spell here, dropping down a couple of divisions from Sunderland. “And I just found myself again, that fire in my belly,” she says. “We ended up getting a promotion and it created that ambition. I know how talented I am, I just needed that confidence.”

All this time later, Newcastle’s outlook is transformed, for the men, for the women, for both. They are not afraid of winning or talking about it. “That’s what we’re wanting to do,” Potts says. “That’s why I’m back at this club, to help them get to the top. We want to show people we’re changing the city of Newcastle for women’s football. We want to show young girls they can dream, too.”

Stobbs refers back to her name. “I was born when Newcastle were on the way up,” she says. “I missed all that stuff. In the early 2000s, my childhood, we were a top team as well. But for a lot of my life, we haven’t been. Everyone speaks about the history and the past and it’s amazing to be full circle and for the club to be back where it should be. I can’t explain it. To have that buzz around the men’s team, for the club to take the women’s team to the next level, is unbelievable.”

And perhaps the most simple and beguiling thought of all.

After all those years, after all that trying and after all that nothing, to see a flash of silver across a football stadium, whether Wembley or Kenilworth Road, and to know that it is Newcastle’s and, in that strange, unknowable moment, to be lost and in love…

Well, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it?

(Top photo: Stu Forster/Getty Images)