Dan Burn’s odyssey grants Newcastle their own special slice of football history | Carabao Cup

Sometimes football just can’t help itself. Even now, in its glazed and managed state, plaything of propaganda machines and sharp-fanged hedge funds, it will still give you these moments, will follow its own gorgeously hammy storylines.

Here it gave Newcastle a story that couldn’t have been more perfectly styled and finished: a Dan Burn day for a Dan Burn team at a Dan Burn Wembley, and a moment before half‑time that seemed to paint the entire world a deep rich shade of Dan Burn.

The first half had been a grudging thing. Newcastle seemed to be the only team with any interest in actually making any football happen. As half‑time loomed Kieran Trippier took a corner from the right. Somehow the Liverpool defence failed to register the vast, ambling figure inside the penalty area, with its distinctive, undulating way of moving, like a friendly CGI diplodocus in a Disney movie.

Burn hadn’t scored since January last year but the only locally born starting player in either team broke that run with the perfect Newcastle goal. Not just the most important in the club’s modern history, but also spectacular in the right way, with something classically cup final about it. This isn’t just a Dan Burn header. This is a Dan Burn power header.

As the ball dipped Burn seemed to hang like a zeppelin, wrenching his neck muscles and producing a header into the corner of the net so agreeably meaty you could almost hear the thunk off his forehead.

At which point the Newcastle end seemed to make a kind of impact noise, a single shared vowel sound travelling the length of the pitch in a rolling wave. Burn closed his eyes, entirely lost in that sensation. It doesn’t really matter what he does for the rest of his public life. This will be his moment, a goal he will still be talking about when he’s 96 years old on a Wembley 3.0 executive gravity balcony alongside the last surviving Ant or Dec – who were of course there to be caught by the TV cameras cavorting and hugging and displaying huge white daytime TV smiles, like perfectly tanned and groomed Easter Island heads.

It is a great football story, redemptive but also instructive at a club where local stuff, rootsiness, a sense of terroir, is forced by circumstance to mingle with other less palatable elements. Scroll back through Burn’s personal history, deep Burn, and this is all just feelgood stuff. Born in Blyth into boyhood Alan Shearer worship. Released by Newcastle at Christmas aged 11 (“it hurt massively”). Time spent collecting trolleys at Asda.

From there, a youth like a Harry Pearson tour of the region, from Blyth Spartans to Darlington on a YTS. Relegated to the Conference aged 18. Released, signed, loaned out. It was the move to Brighton five years ago that made him. From there the switch back to Newcastle was a kind of coronation for a career of seven clubs in all four tiers below the Premier League.

Now we have this, aged 32, the sense of being hoist as a kind of regional spirit animal, an angel of the north, on a day that just couldn’t have gone better. London was buried under a late spring chill at kick-off, a March grey to match Wembley’s vast concrete surrounds. But Newcastle were good right from the start. They shut the spaces down, gave Liverpool no air to breathe. It should feel unpleasant, unsettling, all bruised thighs and lactic acid. This is what Eddie Howe wants to do to you.

Sandro Tonali led the midfield, and Burn played really well behind them, a performance that seemed to stretch up to meet that late-breaking England call. Burn will always stand out simply for his height. Elite footballers tend to glide, super athletes born to move. Burn’s opposite number here was Virgil van Dijk who hasn’t really ever run. Van Dijk eases. He relocates. Burn runs like a man in a hailstorm with sack of coal on his back, a heroic act of will to just to keep lifting his legs.

That one goal lead become 2-0 in the second half, and ended up a convincing 2-1. As the celebrations kicked off Burn hugged his goalkeeper for a very, very long time. Moments such as these are often turning points, too. He’s 33 in May. Newcastle will build again. How much longer will he remain a key peg in this team?

For now, Burn remains a vital presence for Newcastle, in much the same way as Howe’s coaching skills. Both provide a necessary counterpoint to the idea that the current success is a result of spending £500m of Saudi-underwritten money, but is instead organic, built only on good things, essentially a regional levelling up project.

This victory will be vital to growing the club in a way that makes sense. Saudi is not the hand that gives for ever. There has even been talk of a pivot to domestic spending by the PIF. The Line has been wolfing down vast unprocessed slugs of black gold. Who knows what the future may hold.

For now, Newcastle’s supporters will always have this, a perfect moment in time and space, Burn hanging above the Wembley grass, his own slow-Burn narrative arc, and a genuinely lovely football story.