Isaac Hayden

[Disco]

[thenige]

Absolutely insane. Technically he's not the strongest and often plays a safe pass rather than a penetrative one, but you can't fault his work rate.

[Lenny]

I figured he was just totally ill equipped for this division having watched him since promotion, but he's been very useful since pairing up with Longstaff.

[frankpingel]

His value must've doubled since getting this opportunity to play. If he still wants to leave it's been positive all round, he'll get better club and we'll get decent fee and he's been an important part of our current good form.

[triggs]

Schar and Lejeune being so good on the ball basically negates the need for him to do anything special on the ball which he isn't capable of and he's thriving just focusing mainly on winning the ball back and having a good shape when we're out of possession

[James]

Does that mean that Schar has been the 6th best performer in the league this season??

[nemtizz]

Does that mean that Schar has been the 6th best performer in the league this season??

 

 

Yup.

[Gallowgate End]

Does that mean that Schar has been the 6th best performer in the league this season??

 

I wonder who the players will vote for team of the season, Van Dijk alongside?

 

Laporte? Vertonghen?

[Kanj]

He's playing like the Isaac Hayden I thought we had after the Championship season, genuinely felt he and Merino would kick on to be our main men. His form fell so far off too - he's just got a ton of engine, a good tackle, and really good reader of the game. He's very intelligent. I can't help but think this run of form, with Rafa who has always really valued him and believed in him, he has to be re-thinking the transfer request.

[Raconteur]

Remember when he was sent off earlier in the season, when we all thought he was finished as a Toon player? Hell of a turnaround.

[Kanj]

He seemed a yard off the pace, like everything he was doing was too weak, too hard or too slow.

[Tiotes Witch Doctor]

He was nothing short of fantastic tuesday night, I've gone from wanting to pay for his train fare to a new club to seriously hoping he decides to stay, him and Longstaff together just works as the sitting two, while the wingbacks and front three do the rest.

[Kanj]

Can someone post the caulkin interview of Hayden?

[St1pe]

Can someone post the caulkin interview of Hayden?

 

Came to see if it was here too.

[morla84]

Can someone post the caulkin interview of Hayden?

 

Came to see if it was here too.

Great read, hope he gets the move he wants in the summer and leaves with my best wishes.

[Chizzletooth]

His first answer lasts almost 13 minutes, a jumbled torrent of words that reflect just how much Isaac Hayden needs to talk, to explain. The question was not exactly Jeremy Paxman, not quite David Frost or Jonathan Dimbleby, but the gentlest of dollies about whether the Newcastle United midfield player is enjoying his football. Enjoyment, it turns out, is not a straightforward concept. In Hayden’s existence, nothing is.

 

Hayden is playing for “a huge club with fantastic fans,” but satisfaction is tempered. This is “not a place you’d willingly give up,” he says, but it is what he tried to do, pushing to leave Newcastle last summer and again in January, driven to sacrifice something for his family, which is not the way football usually works. And yet his story at St James’ Park is not done. The curtain has risen on a second act.

 

Hayden, 23, has a one-year old daughter who has changed his outlook on lifeHayden, 23, has a one-year old daughter who has changed his outlook on life

IAN HORROCKS FOR THE TIMES

There he was on Tuesday, excelling in a 2-0 victory over Burnley, saluting the crowd afterwards, one of the last to step from the field. And here he is now, picking through his dilemma. If 2018 was the most traumatic year of his life and career, then 2019 has begun very differently, with ten consecutive league appearances for Rafa Benítez’s team. When you think about it — and Hayden does, often — it is all pretty strange.

 

Hayden arrived on Tyneside in the summer of 2016, when Newcastle were preparing for the Sky Bet Championship. An Essex boy, he joined from Arsenal on a five-year contract. “I was single and I had a ‘world is my oyster’ mentality,” he says. He found a city which craved connection. “People want you to relate to their club, to understand it, maybe to fall in love with it,” he says. “I’ve done those things.”

 

Hayden is still only 23, but there are others to love now; Lauren, his fiancé, and Adriana, their one-year-old daughter. Fatherhood has “massively” changed the way he looks at things. “As a player, you do what’s best for the team, but I’m a human being, too, and sometimes you have to do what’s best for your individual circumstances,” he says. “I don’t want to be the kind of person who hides away from saying that, who isn’t honest.”

 

 

Truth pours from him. At Newcastle’s training ground, Hayden is described as a nice lad, smart and quiet, but having tried to protect his family, he now wants supporters to understand. To do that takes detail. “My daughter’s birth and everything leading up to it was very traumatic; not many people know what it was really like,” he says. “My fiancé was very, very ill for the whole term of her pregnancy, the whole 9 months.

 

“She was bed-ridden, couldn’t do anything. She was being sick 20-30 times a day. She had hyperemesis gravidarum, the condition that Kate Middleton had. She was going into hospital to be put on drips. She was in Newcastle at that point, but her family is based in the south west, mine’s in Essex and she really had no support. I remember we played Stoke [City] at home and I was at hospital with her at 5am and then played after three hours sleep. It was carnage.

 

“When Adriana was born in December 2017, she was six weeks premature and then she was in neonatal care. She had ongoing problems with her breathing and temperature control. She was in the Portland Hospital in London. While all that was happening, trying to play football was difficult. She’s doing okay now, but there’re still a lot of things, little checks and stuff, and we like to use the same hospital for her specific needs.

 

Hayden excelled in thre 2-0 victory over Burnley on Tuesday night

Hayden excelled in thre 2-0 victory over Burnley on Tuesday night

SCOTT HEPPELL/REUTERS

“They come and see me quite regularly, but I want to be in a place for my daughter to settle down and have a happy home environment and not be moving around too much. Lauren has done an awful lot for me and given up a lot to have a child, especially in the situation we did. Looking back, I don’t know how she did it. She deserves to be in a position where she’s happy, where’s she’s closer to her family and closer to the hospital.”

 

Because of the skewed way we look at football, some might not accept this logic. Hayden can afford it; buy help, get a nanny. “We tried, but it’s not something we want to do,” he says. So suck it up; he can afford discomfort, too. “People will say, ‘you earn thousands of pounds a week, you’re an hour’s flight away from your child, what’s the problem’, but the whole point of being a dad is to be there,” he says.

 

“When she’s older, I don’t want her to say ‘dad paid for everything, but I only saw him once every three weeks’. I want her to say ‘I did this with daddy, we went there together’. Money isn’t everything. It’s about the time you spend with children, the effort you put in. I want to know her. I don’t want to miss her walking for the first time, talking, all those things. I want to be a proper dad.”

 

In July, Brighton & Hove Albion tried to sign him. It made sense. “It’s frustrating; when people saw Brighton were interested, they assumed I must want more money,” Hayden says. “No. I would have taken a pay cut. It was exactly the same in January. The manager knows that. Everyone at the club knows my situation, my character.”

 

There was empathy from Benítez, from Lee Charnley, Newcastle’s managing director, but the club’s attempts to find a replacement fell through. Pre-season had been a write-off and then Hayden found himself stuck and out of the squad, “a double whammy,” as he puts it. When he was needed at Cardiff City in August, his head was scrambled. His appearance as a half-time substitute was calamitous.

 

“It was a whirlwind,” he says. “I didn’t go on purposefully thinking about getting sent off, that wouldn’t cross my mind, but Josh Murphy was causing us problems, taking players on, skinning players and I thought ‘well, he needs to get whacked’. I couldn’t let him take the piss, but my challenge was too firm, the wrong type of tackle and I knew the red card was coming.

 

“I sat in the dressing-room on my own. I knew what I’d done was wrong, that I was going to get stick. After coming out publicly saying I wanted a transfer to getting sent off, I was at the lowest of lows. It reflected where I was mentally. It just highlighted everything I was feeling, compounding the misery.

 

“When I look back on it now, 2018 as a whole was just terrible. Professionally, I only started two games, I got the first red card of my career and personally, it was difficult as well. I made some mistakes. It was a very stressful period. I hope I’ve improved as a man and as a father since then.”

 

Hayden, from Essex, came through the Arsenal academy

Hayden, from Essex, came through the Arsenal academy

DAVID PRICE/GETTY IMAGES

Lauren, 28, was there for him. “It was some year, but she’s been so supportive,” Hayden says. “She’s done so much for me, especially in terms of the mentality thing. When I was at my lowest she told me to keep my head screwed on, to keep working hard. She’s done more than anybody can ever know.”

 

It has given him perspective. “I wouldn’t say my life has been on hold because you can always find little solutions to improve things, but limbo is the word,” Hayden says. “You don’t know whether you’re coming or going. You’re always in that strange place. I don’t blame the club. They had to do what’s best for them and I completely respect that. You have to respect the fans most of all. When you’re contracted to do a job, you fulfil your duties.”

 

In the meantime, Hayden has found prominence again. Injuries and international call-ups cleared space in Newcastle’s midfield and he has filled it, less newsworthy, perhaps, than Sean Longstaff beside him, but just as impressive and, in a way, more startling. “The manager said to me, ‘you’re good enough to play here, there’s no pecking order, you have a clean slate’,” Hayden says. “He’s been really good with me.”

 

Hayden has been good in return. He is solid, professional, aware of his surroundings. “It’s not like I’ve downed tools,” he says. “I would never do that. I get where people are coming from. They’re Newcastle through and through and if a player comes out and says ‘I want to leave’ for whatever reason, they’re always going to have that angst. But it’s never been the case that I don’t like the club, the city or the fans. I do. It’s nothing to do with that.

 

“This is a huge club. It’s also a frustrating club, because it’s got the infrastructure to be in the Champions League, 52,000 fans at every home game, all the away ends packed out wherever we go, it’s a one-club city. It’s got all the makings to be enormous but for whatever reasons it’s not reaching its potential. It’s not the kind of club you’d want to leave.”

 

The irony of that is not lost on Hayden, a sportsman living a privileged life but still just a person, with the same concerns that each of us have about family and love and guilt and responsibility. A man being pulled in different directions. “You have all these questions in your head,” he says, “but until the summer, that’s it. It’s head down, full focus, doing everything I can to help Newcastle. And I know I can do more. It’s not finished.”

 

In spite of it all, here Hayden is, reborn and reenergised when he least expected it. Here he is, thriving in the Premier League, soaking up applause. “Here I am,” he repeats. “Yeah, exactly.” A smile flickers on his lips. And after all those words, after all that explanation and to return to where we started, is he enjoying his football? Can he? Hayden reconsiders and, this time, his answer is brief. “Yeah,” he says. “I am.”

[sbnufc]

His situation is a shame, would be great to see him stay but obviously circumstances mean otherwise. If everyone put in the graft he has (while wanting out, no less) we'd be better off.

 

He'll get his move in the summer and probably to a Premier League club (probably something not many would have thought say, a year ago) after his great stint in the 1st team here. Good for him, will wish him all the best.

[Lenny]

His situation is a shame, would be great to see him stay but obviously circumstances mean otherwise. If everyone put in the graft he has (while wanting out, no less) we'd be better off.

 

He'll get his move in the summer and probably to a Premier League club (probably something not many would have thought say, a year ago) after his great stint in the 1st team here. Good for him, will wish him all the best.

 

Or even 3 or 4 weeks ago...

[St1pe]

Thanks for posting that, it’s a great read.

 

Impossible to see him not leaving this summer after reading that and impossible not to wish him the best. Hopefully he gets a good move and we get good money for him. I’m guessing it’ll be a hell of a lot more than we would have in January.

[Sho Time]

Like a lot of Rafa's signings, he's a good egg. I think anyone with a degree of empathy for other people can understand his situation and why he wants to leave and just think "fair enough" without getting arsey about it. He's absolutely right, he might be on amazing money but that doesn't help when you've got a lass and bairn with health issues and no family around you. Credit to him for bouncing back and Rafa for managing the situation so well.

 

Once again, the reason the lad can't leave the football club is down to Mike Ashley's refusal to sanction player signings. Proving time and time again what a despicable cunt he is.

[sbnufc]

His situation is a shame, would be great to see him stay but obviously circumstances mean otherwise. If everyone put in the graft he has (while wanting out, no less) we'd be better off.

 

He'll get his move in the summer and probably to a Premier League club (probably something not many would have thought say, a year ago) after his great stint in the 1st team here. Good for him, will wish him all the best.

 

Or even 3 or 4 weeks ago...

 

Harsh He's been playing (well) since christmas

[TRon]

Nothing's changed really, seems like he still needs to be back down south, don't have any problem with it if we can get a fair fee. He's a good mid level Premier midfielder and English, someone will get very good value I suspect.

[Kanj]

Was hoping playing regularly would make him reconsider, because this is the player i thought we'd see after that form he had in the Championship and early in the PL the following season when we came back up. But having read what he and his fiance went through during her pregnancy, her desire to be near her family/hospital, and shit having a family of my own and realizing how important support and happiness for your partner ... i get it. Keep it up this season, and hopefully he gets a proper move this summer.

 

Now go beat West Ham Ike!

[Smal]

Feel for him. He must feel like he's being dragged in every different direction.

 

If the club knew the details of his situation and still didn't make every effort to get a replacement for him it just furthers the evidence to show what kind of people we have running our club. Horrible bastards.

[joeyt]

There were plenty in here slating him for wanting to move down south without knowing the full context