Total Bruno sucks Arteta’s side into turf war and leaves them beaten and bruised | Carabao Cup

Bruno Guimarães is writhing on the turf. Could be trouble, this. He almost seemed to spin through the air as Myles Lewis‑Skelly clipped him. Landed awkwardly. Still down. Clutching his calf, and maybe his rib too? The Newcastle physios crouch expectantly at the touchline. Eddie Howe wears a concerned expression. Referee Simon Hooper brandishes a yellow card.

At this, as if suddenly possessed by a bolt of divine grace, Guimarães slowly rises from his slab and accepts the benedictions of his teammates. Less than 45 seconds later, he will be sprinting at full pelt towards the edge of the Arsenal penalty area and playing an outrageous no‑look pass to Joe Willock with the inside of his heel. Miraculously, Bruno Guimarães has cheated death again.

In a way, those 45 seconds of Newcastle’s 2-0 win against Arsenal were perhaps the purest distillation of that volatile and mystifying substance known as Total Bruno: the boundless skill and the base-metal skulduggery, the artistry and the industry, the beauty and the ugliness, all in one irresistible package. This is a player of sumptuous technical gifts on the ball and yet whose most compelling attribute is probably what he does without it: the 2023‑24 Premier League leader in terms of distance covered, well on course to retain his crown in 2024-25.

Of course, this is just the ground he covers with his feet. What the GPS vests and data readouts won’t tell you is the amount of territory he also manages to occupy in your head. Here Arsenal were dragged into the kind of turf war that was only ever going to produce one winner: not simply beaten but broken, not simply bruised but Bruno-ed.

It was well worth watching the Arsenal players in the closing minutes of this game, a game already lost, a humiliation already curdling around them. Lewis‑Skelly looked like a man haunted by savage ghosts, picking fights with thin air. Kai Havertz, irritated beyond measure, slowly overheating like a plug with the wrong adapter, thwarted and frustrated and basically flabbergasted that grown men were treating him this callously.

Perhaps the most visible gulf between the two sides, though, was right in the centre, where Guimarães and Sandro Tonali were taking Declan Rice back to school. Rice is a fine, gutsy, intelligent player, but he simply has insufficient dawg in him for games such as this. He wants it calmer and simpler, he wants the extra split second that doesn’t exist. Trust the processes. Do the processes. Next thing he knows – yoink! – Guimarães has not only read the pass and won the ball but pinged it 35 yards and given you a sharp but inexplicable pain in the kidneys.

There is naturally a temptation to write off Guimarães as a kind of street thug, your common or garden midfield achilles-botherer. But this is way too simplistic. There is a ferocious intelligence at work here: not just spatial and technical but psychological, a problem‑solving mind, a player constantly probing every potential surface for signs of weakness. Whether it’s your offside trap or your patience, your striker’s brittleness in the tackle or a referee’s nerve in the face of a hostile home crowd, everybody has a breaking point. And Guimarães will make it his night’s work trying to find it.

Here, of course, he was in his element. St James’ Park is one of those stadiums best glimpsed at night: the lit amphitheatre on the hill, the hot breath on cold air, a roar that rolls down from the top of the Gallowgate and feels in its most feral moments like the very disapproval of God himself. This was of course the perfect fixture to elicit it: a second leg almost preordained as a kind of suffering, a night for defending your turf, for 32% possession and slaloming counterattacks, for heroic blocks and bodyslamming these fey southerners into touch.

Howe had opted for a back five, for safety in numbers, and Newcastle hunted in much the same way. Guimarães and Tonali were chasing down everything in midfield. Alexander Isak on current form remains unmatched at turning quarter‑chances into actual chances. Sven Botman was surgically terrifying in defence, blazing a trail of very precise destruction, like a self-driving car gone over to the dark side. Dan Burn merrily Dan Burned all over the place. Fabian Schär and Anthony Gordon led the high press and forced Arsenal to cough up the ball time and again.

But on a night when Newcastle moved one step closer to their destiny, it was striking how completely Guimarães has come to embody this Saudi-owned sporting vehicle: a saviour in villain’s clothing, a thing of pure hunger and yearning, a cleanness wrapped in an entirely unapologetic dirtiness. Better than you, and smarter than you, and utterly unmoved by your disdain. Ask not if Newcastle are ready for Wembley. Ask if Wembley is ready for Newcastle.