Hall has not missed a minute
Lewis Hall has played all 450 minutes of Newcastle's league season, and at 22 he is the only full back in this group who has. Seven full backs aged 23 or under have played enough of the season so far to be worth ranking, and the field they are measured against is the 45 full backs of any age who have.
What separates him is the crossing. Hall puts just over four balls into the box a game, ninth among all 45 of them, and he does it as a left back in a side that has otherwise stopped supplying its forwards almost entirely.
He is also hard to press. Only two full backs in the league beat a man with the ball more often, and he completes 88% of his passes, a figure bettered by five players in the whole field. Those two things together describe a defender opponents cannot shut down by pushing him back towards his own goal, which is the most useful thing a modern full back can be.
The one who does it differently
The case against Hall being the best of them starts with Jorrel Hato, two years younger and directly involved in two goals in 261 minutes. No full back in the league, at any age, has been involved in goals more often than that.
Hato also wins about two duels in every three, fifth in the whole field, and there is a real argument that a 20 year old defending that well while contributing at the top end is the more valuable player of the two.
He has also not completed a single cross all season. That is last of all 45. It is not a quiet month either, because he crossed just as rarely last season, bottom of every full back who got through a full campaign. Hato is doing a different job, closer to a defender who steps into midfield than a full back who gets to the byline, so the comparison with Hall is less a ranking than a choice between two ideas of the position.
What last season says
Five games is not enough to call anyone the best at anything, so the useful test is whether Hall was doing this a year ago. He was. Over more than two thousand minutes last season he crossed at almost exactly the rate he is crossing at now, and he was third among full backs for beating his man then as well as today.
The part that has moved is the part nobody should trust yet. Hall has two goals or assists in five games, seventh in the field, where last season he sat in the bottom half of it. That is the number most likely to come back towards where it was, and the argument for him does not rest on it.
The honest limit is the defending. Hall wins fewer than half of his duels, 27th of the 45, and he sat in almost exactly the same place last season, so this is not a dip but simply the ordinary half of his game. Archie Gray is the warning about reading five matches too closely from the other direction, having won fewer duels than any other full back in the league last season and well over half of them so far this.