The pressure seems to be off the manager at the moment, although no-one can say his team has performed anywhere near as good as we had hoped this season. But SuperMac, a legend in his own lifetime on Tyneside, insisted: "Souness could go without ever once fielding the full-strength team he wants on the park.
"That's how serious all this is - he has the team he wants within the club but far too many of his key players are confined to the treatment table.
"Souness has never once been able to play Nobby Solano and he's had Emre and Albert Luque only for a couple of games. Then there's Kieron Dyer - his fitness record is appalling. Souness won't be able to put out his full side for quite a while with Luque and Dyer struggling so his problems are very real.
"It would be unfair, but he could go the journey and never have been tested on his buys. United have a real problem with hamstring and groin injuries and a full-scale inquiry had better come up with the answers - and quickly. This is getting beyond a joke and the root cause can be one of many things - the training surface, the lifestyle of certain players, the warming-up programme, even the type of boots some players wear these days.
"When we had a similar problem over infections while I was manager of Fulham an inquiry revealed that it was actually down to the fertiliser used on our pitches. Hamstring injuries have always been a common injury for footballers - but not in the sort of numbers we're witnessing at Newcastle.
"As yet it would appear they haven't found the answer, but they had better or Souness will suffer badly. He hasn't time on his side. It's getting almost laughable if it wasn't so critical. I watched Dyer and Patrick Kluivert go down as though shot last season when they hadn't even reached full throttle. So did Luque a few weeks back. He was carried off on a stretcher while I was still trying to locate the sniper!
"Results aren't as good as they ought to be for a huge outlay in the transfer market and the manager gets it in the neck while the nucleus of his team are lying in the treatment room."