The opening line of Big Ron Atkinson's Bumper Book of Football Cliches reads as follows: "You make your own luck in this game." It is obvious then, that Newcastle United have been relishing in their work at the training ground recently; so many horseshoes to polish, all those rabbits feet to kiss.
The cynic might argue that if they spent anything like as long honing their defending from set-pieces, such honest endeavour would not be necessary; but then again, even the most mealy-mouthed of sceptics was probably too enthralled by Newcastle's latest, last-gasp comeback for such a petty observation. Still, it needed to be made.
On five heart-stopping occasions this season, United have now scraped a goal to pilfer a point or snatch a victory in the final five minutes of a match. As so often before, it was the wing-back John Beresford - without as much as a sniff of scoring for the previous two years - who materialised in the penalty area to meet Temuri Ketsbaia's cross from right field to make it an improbable six goals since August.
If it was not the comfortable excursion that Kenny Dalglish must have prayed for in the run-up to a European game, then at least it drew a wobbly line under the sequence of three defeats that had preceded their previous encounters in the Champions' League.
Any watching representative of PSV Eindhoven cannot help but have taken note of the comical ineptitude that Newcastle at times exhibited. The first item on any scouting report passed back to PSV's coach Dick Advocaat will doubtless make mention of the absent marking which prompted all three City goals.
Each of Newcastle's cumbersome trio of centre-halves stands at over six feet tall, but they might have been pygmies for all the impression they made when their pugnacious visitors predictably flung the ball high into the penalty area.
Ian Marshall - who had brought down Ketsbaia for John Barnes sixth-minute penalty - redeemed himself twice over by rising at the far post to score unchallenged with his head, converting both a swerving free kick from Steve Guppy and Muzzy Izzet's centre from the right-hand edge of the box.
Such a simple ploy, but effective too, and repeated in the second half when Guppy delivered a corner towards the forehead of Matt Elliott.
The waning confidence of Jon Dahl Tomasson - and the unrest it engenders in the crowd - can be the only explanation of why he was credited with a goal he had merely the faintest knowledge of, deflecting the path of Des Hamiltons header from a Ketsbaia corner late in the first period.
