Farewell, Callum Wilson

YOUSEF HATEM (@yousef-1892.bsky.social) waves a fond goodbye to our number nine, with thanks for all the goals.

Let’s pretend this article is being written in the summer of 2024, not 2025.

Look, if the spivs of SW6 can pretend that their women’s team is worth £200m, then surely it’s fine for anyone to pretend anything.

Let’s hope that’s okay, anyway, for it would be unfortunate to allow recency bias – which in this case would have been the sad sight of CW9 dragging his unwilling body around the Emirates pitch with all the surefootedness of a man trying to manoeuvre a forklift truck in an airport Wetherspoons – to disfigure what should be overwhelmingly happy memories of his time here.

He scored 47 in 95 Premier League games for us, to last summer. One in two, pretty much bang on. Michael Owen (and there’s a name I despise even writing, unless it really can’t be helped) won the Ballon d’Or for that kind of carry-on. Dominic Calvert-Lewin gets less than one in four. You know, just in case you’re trying to place Wilson in any kind of company.

The big Midlander posted respectable figures throughout his stay here, and in lean times too: a double-figure return in the joyless Covid season under Bruce serving as testament to that. But if that was the agreeable drumbeat, Wilson also gave us moments – if not quite to treasure, then to nonetheless remember him by, when the history of Newcastle United in its transitional phase from Sports Direct subsidiary to Saudi pet project comes to be written. Two particular headed goals celebrated as loudly in the stadium as any of recent memory: against West Ham, five minutes into the first home game at a full St James’ Park after lockdown, and against Spurs, only two minutes into the first one post-takeover. (We lost both matches of course: this was back when golf on the Algarve took precedence over fitness training, and everyone was too tired after the opening twenty minutes to protect any kind of lead. Still, they were moments all the same). His superlative acrobatic finish at Selhurst as we burgled a point in the first game post-Bruce. His scrambled yet ingenious drive into the roof of the net to secure a priceless (an over-used word if ever there was one, but emphatically not, here) 1-0 success over Burnley on 4 December 2021, a first league win at the fifteenth (!) time of asking. History does not record what might have happened, but for that goal. The most instinctive of finishes in a 2-0 over Forest at the start of 2022-23. Smashing into Hugo Lloris and then lobbing him from the edge of the box to set us on our way to one of the most impressive victories of that most impressive season. A beauty at Goodison the following spring, as we treated that particular match as our own private goal-of-the-season competition.

A proper striker, capable of bullying opponents, who carried himself with an unmistakeably Geordie swagger despite being a son of Coventry, a swagger that tended to continue after the final whistle and into post-match interviews where he referred to himself in the third person. A pain in the arse to others, but never to his team-mates. On the pitch, he held the ball up and brought them into play. And off it? Remember, he came in when Joelinton wore the storied number nine. Wilson took number thirteen without complaint. (This simply cannot be held up as a triumph of Bruce’s man-management: quite how Bacon Man ever saw the Brazilian as a centre-forward in the first place remains baffling in the extreme). The new signing from Bournemouth said: “The shirt’s just a number at the end of the day – I’m playing for the badge at the front.” True enough, and yet he nonetheless departs as one of the more fondly recalled number nines – and certainly the sexiest – of recent decades, having done the job in the true, barnstorming style.

In the early Ashley era, we were a selling club. We did not like it, but there was at least a transfer strategy of sorts. We bought cheap (usually French) players. Some worked out. Others (those whose ambitions involved finishing above seventeenth) were sold for a tidy profit. Some didn’t work out but, usually, not at great financial cost. But by the time Wilson joined, all pretence at strategy had gone. We stuck to freebies like (shudder) Jeff Hendrick, and Andy Carroll’s depressing imitation of his younger self, or we bought damaged goods that nobody else wanted. Wilson was the latter. His injury record, while it came to frustrate us, was also why we were able to get him. Nowhere good wanted to touch him. Had he not been made of glass, he’d have gone elsewhere, and we’d have been much the poorer for it, to the tune of dozens of goals. (The “damaged goods” point was, of course, also why we got to enjoy ASM – had he been possessed of a reliable end product, there is no way he’d have come to this asylum).

So farewell, CW9. Thank you for your professionalism, skill and dedication, for all you brought to this place. I wish you’d signed off with a goal at Wembley, but I was delighted to see you trotting down to the corner flag as the clock ticked over the ninety-minute mark and thousands of Geordie eyes began to believe what they were seeing. I’m so pleased you won something here. You cannot have had that on your bingo card. Thank you, above all else, for all the goals. And, please, remember who your friends are: we can’t have you doing a Chris Wood and scoring a hat-trick against us next time we meet.

You’re one of us, and you’ll always be welcomed back here.

YOUSEF HATEM / @yousef-1892.bsky.social