At 6.46pm on a crisp, clear Sunday in north west London, Bruno Guimaraes lifted a small metal pot above his head and in that moment the clocks stopped for Newcastle United. No longer were they the club that has not won a domestic trophy for 70 years, no longer were they the club of second place and glorious failure, of trying and failing, of miserable failure and of failure full stop and, instead, they became something else. At last, they are something else.
Amid a sea of scarves, the cup went up and the reset button was pressed, leaving that ache of pain and their long wait buried within their psyche – always there, never forgotten – and now their entire identity has shifted. Who and what are they, this team of warriors in black and white, these dementors and disrupters, who poured forward and held firm against Liverpool, who etched this new version of history? Who are they, this team of winners?
How would it feel to win something? That is the question that has always been asked and how could anybody respond, when the answer has always felt so unknowable, so unreachable? Turns out it feels like this; Dan Burn leaping, Alan Shearer dancing with Will, his son, Eddie Howe racing from the dugout, fists clenched, Alexander Isak slamming in a second and then this explosion of everything.
From across the stadium come small stories of supplication: the woman holding a picture of her dad which she rubs for good luck; the man who spends the entire second half with his hands clasped as if in prayer; a note from one friend which says “my heart rate is so high,”; and from another, “everyone around me is crying – I’m blacking out.” Towards the end, it feels like agony which, as it goes, is a pretty similar feeling to losing.
A little later, Shearer, who is both Newcastle’s record goalscorer and hewn from granite, says: “I’ve shed more tears tonight than ever before.” After all this time, who knew that winning would be so bloody painful?
Yet this was not losing. Categorically, it was not losing, although beyond that it was difficult to say, simply because none of it was recognisable. “I feel numb,” Burn said to reporters afterwards. “I really want to feel some emotion, but it’s hard. It’s just very surreal.” On Friday, the 32-year-old was called up into the England squad for the first time. “I’ve had worse weeks,” he said. “I don’t want to go to sleep because I feel like I’m dreaming and it’s all going to be a lie.”
For the first time since the FA Cup final in 1955, Newcastle turned up at Wembley. This is the bedrock for everything. They have had good players and good teams in the past and it has been their misfortune to face some great ones, but what there has never quite been is that perfect synergy between pitch and stands, that force of nature which has often rocked St James’ Park, when Newcastle become noise.
On March 16 2025, Newcastle rocked up at Wembley and brought the noise. The foundations shook.
The lap of celebration was done and dusted, the red end of the stadium was deserted, but Newcastle could not quite let go. Players and staff had done their traditional victory photograph in front of their fans and every member of staff, from the kitmen to the media crew to the photographer herself, had been pictured with the trophy, a nice inclusive touch, when Howe was dragged back towards the stands.
Handed the cup, Howe both held on and let go, raising it a couple of times, his hands punching air, and then he was pushed forward again by Guimaraes for a second go. Not the first time, you wondered how this quiet, intense, insular man – this man of Bournemouth and now of Tyneside – whose effort underpins everything, has managed to awake such ferocity and then channel it with such precision.
Howe does not do emotion. Or, rather, during the helter-skelter of matches, he tunes out and hones in on the things he can affect. In public, he is polite, good-natured and respectful, although this side of his personality disguises the adversity he faced as a player and a young coach, from being told he was being released as a kid, to the injuries that forced him to retire early, to not being paid, to a points deduction and transfer embargoes. This fella is made of steel.
But emotion found him on Sunday evening, as he spoke about the “relief,” of surviving those last endless minutes of time added on, when Federico Chiesa had got one back and those familiar old doubts flickered back towards the light. “And then naturally you end up thinking of the players, the staff, but also the people who aren’t with you, like for me, my mum,” he said and here, his voice broke and his eyes misted. Anne Howe died in 2012.
In the lead up to the match, much was made of the need to drain significance from the occasion. At the Carabao Cup final in 2023, Newcastle, as a club, won the weekend, fans streaming into London and colonising Trafalgar Square, but had nothing left to give against Manchester United. Players had expended all their energy beforehand, knowing that they could be the team that entered legend. They lost 2-0.
“I’ve said it before; it was quite an emotional time last time,” Burn said. “I felt a bit more like this was just a normal game, sort of business as usual.” But, make no mistake, this was not a withdrawal of emotion; Newcastle were both white hot and ice cold, their emotion aimed squarely at Liverpool. And this is business as usual at St James’, at least when things are going well. It just never has been at Wembley. This time, their emotion was fire.
Howe is the first English manager to win a major trophy since Harry Redknapp’s Portsmouth in 2008 and he automatically becomes the most important manager in Newcastle’s modern history. He understands the rhythms of the club in the way that Kevin Keegan and Sir Bobby Robson did but has shaped it in a different way. Aggression is his starting point and adventure follows. The Entertainers revisited? Sure – if you get your kicks at the Colosseum.
“He is a great man who works hard to give everything,” said Joelinton, the hapless No 9 who became a midfield rampager and who best personifies Newcastle’s journey from laughing stock to cup-winners. “It has been an unbelievable journey together and I’m happy to give him the title,. Every time I step on the pitch I do it for him. He changed my position and gave me the confidence to play. I love him.” Liverpool could not live with Joelinton’s ferocity, a story told across the pitch.
One of Howe’s favourite moments this season came in the minutes before kick-off in the second leg of their semi-final against Arsenal, when – in a rare episode of spatial awareness – he saw the Wor Flags banner which was held up in the Gallowgate End and which read “Get into them.” Howe was delighted; it was a message which reflected exactly what he wanted his team to look like. The flag was back at Wembley and it was no coincidence.
Get into them; from the whistle’s first blow, they did it and Liverpool – mighty Liverpool – reeled backwards. For five minutes it felt like a good start, 15 was a milestone, 30 minutes, yeah, going well so far, half-time was astonishing given Burn’s brilliant header, and at each of those checkpoints there was an unsaid ‘but’. But something will happen, but Liverpool will respond, but it will all go wrong.
And then suddenly there was Guimaraes, Newcastle’s Brazilian heartbeat, hoisting the trophy with Kieran Trippier alongside him and those buts would remain unsaid forever. They weren’t needed. Howe’s players were better, superior, controlled, efficient, composed and excellent and victory meant they had beaten the four teams at the top of the Premier League en route to the trophy. Let nobody say this has been easy. Let everybody say it is wonderment.
“I don’t know,” Guimaraes said when asked how it felt to be a man who drew a line under the old version of Newcastle. “I haven’t realised what we’ve done. Wow, unbelievable. Wow, no words. Still crazy things going through my head. When I first came here, I said I wanted to put my name in the club’s history. That’s it. After 70 years we can now say we are the champions again – and fully deserve everything. It’s one of the best days of my life.”
His day had started with a message from Shearer, one captain to another, links in a chain. It read: “Bring that trophy back to the Toon please skipper,” and it was followed with black and white hearts. Every time Shearer was shown on the big screen, Newcastle fans cheered. “Some day, when I leave this club, I want the fans to sing my name the same way they did to Shearer when they have seen him,” Guimaraes said. “He texted me before the game.” No need to go, but aside from that, completed it, mate.
Burn, who grew up watching Robson’s team, Shearer’s team, was asked what Newcastle have become now that they are no longer the team who haven’t or don’t or can’t or won’t. “Hopefully, that’s the first of many,” he said. “I didn’t like saying it, but it did feel like a bit of a burden, just with how long it had been. We felt the pressure, but it was just going to take that one time to break through that ceiling.”
In Covent Garden on Saturday, on the eve of the game, Newcastle fans were winning the weekend again. Black and white shirts were everywhere, people clogging the thoroughfares and slowing down commerce, albeit not so much at the nearby Tesco, which was operating a strict one-in, one-out policy. Shelves of alcohol were picked bare. Cans and bottles were opened and shared as flares were lit and waved. It was genial carnage.
It didn’t look or sound different from two years earlier, but everybody was saying it felt different. Families and friends drank and sang, but there was a knowledge this time that Wembley should be the focal point rather than an afterthought, albeit in a context of celebration. How can you be blasé about occasions like this when it is now the longest spell in Newcastle’s history without attending an FA Cup final, for example? How do you make the exceptional mundane?
In the pub, a lad lifted up his trouser leg to show a tattoo of two magpies and everybody cheered. Luck might be necessary; without Anthony Gordon and Lewis Hall, Howe was lacking his first-choice left side, but as the night matured and wore on, hope grew. This is the beauty of football in general and Newcastle in particular, where emotion swings with abandon. A week ago was to be moribund. Tonight, here, was to banish care.
On Sunday morning, near Kings Cross, the True Faith podcast were holding a live event; £17 in for 105 fans including a sausage sandwich and a pint. The conversation: what do we do if we win, who am I if we win, how would we commemorate winning in statue form?
A story is told about sharing a plane ride down to Heathrow Airport the evening before with a group of women, all singing, all rowdy, all banging on their luggage like percussion and maybe they’re singing in Portuguese and is this a hen do or a birthday party and we’re football fans and we’ve all had a drink, but how noisy and annoying is this and oh look it’s Bruno’s wife and family and how beautiful and perfect is that? Bringing the noise, together.
Together, they brought it. Trippier, Newcastle’s aging standard bearer, who played on in pain to ensure one more transformation. Fabian Schar and Jacob Murphy, both discarded in the bad old days and now integral. Isak, Sandro Tonali and Guimaraes, players of genuine, generational ability. Burn, who never gave up and now becomes an immortal. All of them, though, this incredible patchwork team hitting a sweet-spot of old and new. All of them, brothers.
“I’m just so happy,” Burn said. “This group of players in the club at the moment deserve to win a trophy. It would have been a huge shame if we hadn’t done it. So, yeah, it’s amazing. The experience of losing it last time has worked in our favour this time. We knew what to expect. It was the perfect performance.”
And it was. “There are different ways to win trophies,” said Howe, as if any way other than just doing it mattered. “Today we won it in the best way. We played a brilliant opponent who have been the best in the Premier League all season by a long way. And for me, we were the better team.”
What does it mean to be winners? After all this time, all this yearning, after all those years, it means a car picking Burn up from Boxpark at Wembley at 10pm on Sunday evening, around three and a half hours after the final whistle, to take him to St George’s Park for England duty. It means life changes forever and life carries on. It means the first one chalked up and business as usual.
After a lifetime of waiting, how do you sum up what you’ve thought about for so long? How can words capture it?
It means the miracle of something else.
(Charlotte Wilson/Offside/Offside via Getty Images)
