Carver hopes for change in fortune

12 April 2015 07:17

Head coach John Carver is hoping Newcastle can do at Liverpool on Monday night what they finally managed to do at Manchester United last season.

The Magpies have not won a league game at Anfield since April 1994, when goals from Rob Lee and Andy Cole secured a 2-0 victory.

However, they had not managed to collect three points at Old Trafford since February 1972 when Yohan Cabaye fired them to a 1-0 win in December 2013, and Carver is pinning his hopes on a similar breakthrough on Merseyside.

He said: "We have a great relationship with the Liverpool fans. Liverpool and Newcastle fans have had some fantastic matches to watch between the sides, like the two 4-3 games there.

"We've responded in the past and the players owe it to themselves. We won at Old Trafford last season. So, Theatre of Dreams, Anfield - two meccas of football - and it can be done."

Should Newcastle manage to turn around their fortunes at Anfield, they could hardly have chosen a better time to do so with Tyneside still picking through the wreckage of a fifth successive derby defeat at Sunderland last weekend.

That, coupled with a slide which has seen them win just two of the 13 games they have played since Carver replaced Alan Pardew at the helm, has created a mutinous atmosphere with fans waging a campaign to boycott the next home game, Tottenham's visit to St James' Park.

Pardew's former assistant is well aware of the strength of feeling having had first-hand experience of it on the city's streets in recent days, but he is hoping those who make the trip across the Pennines will do what they have always done and get behind the team.

Carver said: "It's not easy to take, mind, it's hard to take, but you have to, you have to live with it. It's part of what we do.

"It would be dead easy to say, 'I've had enough, thanks'. I'm not going to do that, and I have still got my enthusiasm, as you can see.

"When we get to Anfield, the fans will still be hurting from last weekend, but hopefully they'll put all that aside and get behind the team."

Source: PA