‘Not in my hands’: diplomatic Howe has lost control of Isak’s Newcastle future

The £150m-rated Sweden striker has effectively gone on strike as he holds out for a transfer to champions Liverpool

As a player at Bournemouth and Portsmouth Eddie Howe could invariably be found reading the foreign news pages of the broadsheets while travelling to matches on the team bus.

More than two decades on, the Newcastle manager’s ability to construct carefully worded sentences loaded with calibrated between-the-lines subtext make it easy to imagine him as some sort of international envoy.