“I won’t lie, I replay that chance regularly in my head,” Elias Sorensen says. “I see it over and over again, thinking, ‘Who knows what would have happened if I’d put that one in?’ I maybe would have been involved with the first team more by now.”
When Sorensen’s mind is not occupied, it often drifts back to July 20, 2019, to the Hongkou Stadium in Shanghai.
It is eight minutes into Sorensen’s full Newcastle United debut, during a pre-season friendly against West Ham United, and Isaac Hayden is free down the right. The midfielder fizzes a ball into the box and Sorensen slides to meet it. There is an open goal in front of the Dane and, with Steve Bruce, the newly-appointed head coach watching on in his first match in charge, Sorensen senses this an opportunity.
“It never gets any better,” Sorensen says. “I often watch it back as well, just to be sure, and I think to myself,…
