It was only on Friday morning that Eddie Howe joked about his gravelly voice being the symptom of shouting at his Newcastle players for the past fortnight. Just hours later, however, he would test positive for Covid-19.
In a cruel twist of fate entirely in keeping with a football club whose hogging of headlines is seldom anything to do with football, Howe will now miss his first match in charge at home to Brentford on Saturday afternoon.
The hot take on the news was at least consistent - 'only at Newcastle United'. Unbelievable? Sadly, on Tyneside, all too believable.
New Newcastle manager Eddie Howe will miss his first game on Saturday due to coronavirus
Howe took training at St James' Park this week before Saturday's home game with Brentford
Howe, though, remains focused. He will FaceTime each player before the game and will be in contact with his backroom staff throughout. In fact, he has had a plan in place for this eventuality since the outbreak of the pandemic in March of last year.
That does not come as a surprise given the noises that have emerged about Howe's impact since his arrival last week.
He had been on the training pitch with his new players for a matter of minutes when he barked at them: 'If you think you are maxed out, you are not.'
That has been the theme of the past two weeks, redefining limits. The international 'break' has been anything but, save for a staff-bonding trip to a Newcastle restaurant. Even then Howe was alarmed when headlines revealed he had taken the group to a 'pub', especially given his insistence that alcohol was a no-go.
Newcastle boss Howe (right) took his staff to The Three Mile Inn in Gosforth on Thursday
The Three Mile Inn is famed for its happy-hour buzzer and was a popular haunt of The Entertainers for an afternoon session in the mid-Nineties.
Howe's idea of an afternoon session is somewhat different. As for happy hours, they are spent raising the bar, not propping it up.
The one word to emanate from the training ground has been 'intensity'. His first day, and every one thereafter, has been spent drilling
