With one swish of his left foot Cheick Tioté was a Newcastle United cult hero

By August 2008 the word had already got out among Premier League scouts that a 22-year-old midfielder from the Ivory Coast, recently signed up by FC Twente after an eye‑catching season on loan at Roda JC, had something about him. It would be instructive to see how he fared at a higher level and a Champions League qualifier for Steve McClaren’s side against Arsenal provided an early chance to find out just how quickly Cheick Tioté was learning. The sight of him sticking to Robin van Persie like glue during Twente’s home leg, subduing the striker into irrelevance with an insistent performance that at times cared little for the boundaries of the law, lingered in more than a few minds and memories would be jolted firmly enough in due course.

Tioté eventually joined Newcastle, who had been attracted by his tenacity and undeterred by an inconsistency in possession that led some suitors to waver, in 2010 and would find himself working for McClaren again five years later. Both had seen better days than a 2015-16 season that reflected appallingly on the Tyneside club but, while McClaren ended up being sacked and scarcely mourned, Tioté was one of the few who rode out a turbulent interlude with his standing among supporters relatively unimpaired.

Given the revolving door at St James’ Park over the past decade, that says plenty. But there had always been good reason to enjoy the presence of Tioté, a wholehearted and proactive performer who played at the kind of intensity fans appreciate even when things are not going well. “I don’t like to make a lot of noise,” he said a few months after his arrival but he had non-verbal ways of making his point. It helped that, in only his 19th appearance for the club – having already picked up eight yellow cards and one red – he produced the kind of flourish that, in the blink of an eye, moulds a cult hero. The left-footed 25-yard volley that pegged Arsenal, opponents he always warmed towards, back to an improbable 4-4 draw was perfect in both execution and timing. The moment was etched instantly in Premier League folklore, never mind that of his club; a bolt from the blue that had never seemed likely and would rarely come close to happening again.

It would be his only goal for Newcastle; the tally of bookings would reach 14 by the end of his first season and discipline was never something he fully mastered. But that was how Tioté operated; there would never be any compromising when a ball was there to be won. “You take that side of the game out of Cheick and you don’t get the same player,” his team-mate James Perch said after a costly red card against Sunderland in October 2012. A Tyne-Wear derby is never an occasion for mistakes, but if anyone could be forgiven such an error it was Tiote. The idea of leaving anything on the pitch was anathema.

Tioté’s was not simply a tale of unchannelled aggression. Between 2011 and 2013 he and Yohan Cabaye formed one of the league’s best midfield partnerships – an efficient blend of vision, vigour and tactical intelligence whose apex came in a 3-0 win against Manchester United in January 2012. This was Tioté’s peak but, while Cabaye would move on, he stayed at Newcastle despite intermittent talk of interest from Champions League clubs – in particular Arsenal, a move he would certainly have welcomed. As Newcastle’s fortunes ebbed, his own form and fortune did too, injuries dogging his final two seasons and ensuring that, by the time he moved to Beijing Enterprises in February, disappointment about his departure was more sentimental than directed towards its impact on a revitalised team’s promotion campaign.

Joining a club at the highest level may have eluded him but Tioté appeared twice in Ivory Coast’s Africa Cup of Nations-winning campaign of 2015. That success meant everything; little had come easy during his early days in football, starting out at the semi‑professional club FC Bibo in his home city of Yamoussoukro and finessing his qualities without the aid of proper boots until the age of 15.

“That’s what made me who I am today,” he said of an upbringing that guaranteed nothing. Tioté, though, would turn into a player who guaranteed every ounce of perspiration he had as soon as he stepped on to a pitch. The frayed edges were there, but for a time he was one of the best; it is a tragedy that football, and the world he inhabited beyond it, should be mourning him now.