NEWCASTLE: Scotland star Ryan Fraser has been banished to train with the Newcastle United youth team as Eddie Howe admits to making a personal call on the winger.
Fraser has become a peripheral figure for Newcastle this season, despite having played a key role last campaign, and previously under Howe while at AFC Bournemouth.
And even though numbers are short in the club’s 25-man Premier League squad, Howe has taken the decision to remove wideman Fraser from the main group, with the player almost certain to leave the club this summer.
“Ryan’s training with the Under-21s,” Howe said.
“I made the decision to concentrate on players that are committed to Newcastle. For the benefit of the group, I’ve made that call.”
When asked whether former Aberdeen man Fraser has a future at the club, the head coach said: “I think that’s a difficult one for me to answer, because I’d never put a firm decision on that, because life and football can change quickly, but, I’d say at the moment, no, he doesn’t.”
While Fraser is highly unlikely to play any further part in Newcastle’s push for a return to European football in more than a decade, one player who has been made available is Bruno Guimaraes.
The midfielder, left out of Brazil’s latest international squad after an underwhelming World Cup, limped out of the Magpies’ Carabao Cup final loss to Manchester United with an ankle issue.
However, Howe says that the key man will be back at Manchester City.
“Yeah, Bruno’s fine,” he said. “He was in a bit of short-term pain but nothing that has impacted his training.”
Howe still has eyes on Europe this season, even though his side have slid down the table a touch after losing to Liverpool in their last top-flight outing.
“In the league, we’ve stalled a little bit in the sense that we’ve missed a couple of games and we haven’t won the games we would have wanted to, so we need to reignite that,” he said.
“The cup final, as much as we didn’t want it to be, was a big distraction for us. It wasn’t so much for me as I was preparing for games, but for the players, I’m sure their lives and families, every time they went outside the door it probably hit them in the face.
“That’s gone now, and we’re back to the league where we want to attack everything and finish as high as we can.”
Meanwhile, there has been a boardroom reshuffle at Newcastle with former director Majed Al-Sorour removed from St. James’ Park dealings.
In Al-Sorour’s place come new directors, as confirmed by Companies House — Abdulmajid Ahmed Alhagbani and Asmaa Mohammed Rezeeq. The former is senior manager of head of securities in the Middle East and North Africa with PIF. The latter has been a senior analyst with PIF since 2018.
