Steven Taylor

STEVEN Taylor has called for a no-holds-barred inquest into Saturday’s 4-1 defeat at Aston Villa after he admitted Newcastle United’s players only had themselves to blame for their predicament.

Newcastle crashed to their fourth successive away defeat at Villa Park, despite taking an early lead through Michael Owen’s header and the Magpies are now six points off the dreaded drop zone and just two ahead of local rivals Sunderland.

United have not won a Premier League game since the 1-0 victory at Fulham on December 15 and the team’s fragile confidence facilitated their second-half capitulation against Martin O’Neill’s rampant side.

But Taylor, part of a defence which failed to cope with Villa’s direct football and the physical threat of John Carew and Marlon Harewood, insisted they cannot afford to feel sorry for themselves.

“It was very disappointing to say the least,” said Taylor. “We played well in the first half and I thought the team performance was quality, but then it just went in the second half. It reminded me of Old Trafford when we lost 6-0. The shape went and our heads were gone.

“If you look at the first-half performance I don’t think you can say the team is brittle because we played well. But when the first goal went in, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know whether we are feeling sorry for ourselves or what, but we’ve got to snap out of it.

“We’ve got to dig ourselves out of a hole and the only way we are going to do that is if we stick

together. We can’t afford to feel sorry for ourselves. In fact, that’s probably the worst thing we can do because we haven’t got a game for two weeks.

“Only we can sort this out and we’ve got to take a long hard look at ourselves on the training ground in the next couple of weeks to put this right. We’ve got to improve, it’s as simple as that.”

Despite their poor form, Newcastle frustrated Villa in the first half to such an extent that the home side were booed off at half time. But it was a completely different story in the second half after O’Neill had brought on Harewood and Craig Gardner and instructed a more direct game. And, after Wilfred Bouma had equalised with a deflected shot, Villa went on the rampage against a United side who could not cope with their set-piece threat.

Taylor added: “The first goal was a killer because it was a deflected shot, but then we fell apart from set-pieces. Aston Villa have got a reputation for scoring goals from set-pieces but we didn’t deal with that threat.

“We knew what they were all about, in the first half we got after them and their fans were not very happy at half-time. But the second half, they scored a deflected goal and that was it. It’s back to the drawing board, we’ll look back at this game, what went wrong and we’ll take it from there. We’re not thinking about a relegation, not at all, we’ve just got a big game coming up against Manchester United and we’re concentrating on that. Relegation doesn’t come into the equation.”

Meanwhile, Kevin Keegan believes he will be able to lift his disillusioned players before the clash with Manchester United in just under a fortnight’s time – but the rest is up to them.

He said: “One of the things I’d like to think I can help them with is the spirit because I’ve always been like that as a player. It is difficult sometimes when players have taken a few blows. They do start to feel sorry for themselves they do start to get hard on themselves, they do start to think ‘not again’. I’d like to think myself and all the staff can help them round that.”

He added: “It’s not a case of just coming in waving a magic wand. There’s lots of things that I think have conspired against Newcastle United to make it the club where it is today and we’re trying to address some of those. They are not all about players and performances but the one that can lead it and the one that must lead the club is the players and us – we front it and we take it where we want it to go.”