If Eddie Howe had wanted the England job he could quite possibly have secured it last summer but, instead, Newcastle’s manager let it be known he had unfinished business in the north east.

Howe has never been shy about discussing his “burning ambition” to preside over a first major trophy since the Fairs Cup in 1969 and, in the course of a triumphalist night on Tyneside , Mikel Arteta was left badly singed by the searing heat of that desire.