"It just looks a mess at Newcastle. There’s a positivity at Palace, there’s a negativity at Newcastle. Sometimes that comes from the manager and the way he speaks in the press but most of it comes from the owner and what’s going on behind-the-scenes. The fact that Newcastle are getting a player on the last day on the window who can’t get a game for Leicester and may only play 10 games between now and the end of the season. The other striker - Joselu - couldn’t get a game for Stoke, another team down there. Newcastle are a bit of a shambles.
"It doesn’t help. When you lose a game the focus goes away from the pitch and you can hide behind that. I think that happened at Liverpool. I think the Newcastle players: some of them will be doing that. But when the team sheet comes in, that is a team that should be fighting relegation. It still feels like the team that was in the Championship. This club has gone down twice under Mike Ashley with far better teams than this and bigger names. So when Rafa went down he sold the Premier League players, Wijnaldum, Sissoko and a couple of others, and built a team to get out of the Championship. They haven’t bought Premier League players since they got back.
"I don’t even think Newcastle are thinking about competing with top four anymore. They just want to compete with Brighton and Huddersfield who they came up with, and that’s the problem. They’re not even competing with these clubs. They’re getting players from clubs that they’re bigger than and they’re getting the strikers they don’t want just to give them a fighting chance of staying up. Newcastle are getting a squad player from Chelsea, not even a squad player really. He’s surplus to requirements at Chelsea."