It was the match which delivered English club football to one of it's darkest days: two teams bankrolled by blood money playing out a game to the soundtrack of taunts and jokes from fans for whom the unspeakable horrors of Kharkiv, Mariupol and Riyadh clearly don’t make the remotest difference.
If anyone needed reminding of the disgusting cash source which makes Newcastle United the latest Premier League arrivistes, then it came in the news agency reports which dropped on Saturday. They revealed that the club’s Saudi state owners had just put 81 people to death in the kingdom’s largest mass execution in years.