Pardew: "We will go to Manchester City thinking we can win"

Alan Pardew has resurfaced after taking some time away during the first part of the international break.

Good job really considering we are up against Manchester City at the weekend. Puppet or not (or is that outdated now?) I'd say it's pretty important to have manager in place for the trip to the Etihad Stadium.

Football news has been in short supply over the last few days with the international break leaving us with an empty chasm, which was rather delicately filled using a sledgehammer by our illustrious owner and his foul mouthed sidekick over the weekend. However, thankfully, it will soon be back to business.

Newcastle now face the two toughest away days in the Premier League in consecutive weekends. First up it's moneybags Manchester City, which is frightening enough when you look at the amount of talent they have at their disposal, followed by a trip to their neighbours Manchester United. Again daunting considering they have a habit of hitting top form against us. However Pardew believes that the players believe they can win on Saturday.

“Belief comes from results as much as anything. I genuinely think the team believe they can win every game we enter. We will go to Manchester City thinking we can win," Pardew told The Chronicle.

He continued: “That is very important because every manager, I don’t care who he is, sets their team up to win, they have a tactical plan in place."

“Players, though, have to believe because if there is not an inner belief you can win then the players after 25 minutes, 30 minutes, accept it is going to be a tough day."

“Perhaps they start protecting themselves, come off the gameplan and then it is usually a case of trying to keep the score down or make it respectable. We are not doing that, we believe we can win, no matter if the other team scores two. We still believe we can win.”

There has been a lot of noise made about our good start to the season. Apparently we've not been tested and have had easy games along with a shedload of luck along the way. Whilst it would be foolish to suggest that we've not had a bit of luck at times, it's also foolish to suggest that we aren't third on merit given the talent that we have in our squad. This is eomthing Pardew seem to agree with. He said:

“When you actually look at our squad, I thought it was a lot stronger than people were giving it credit for. Nevertheless, you still need breaks and you still need to gain wins at crucial times. The Sunderland game was a massive game for us and then the Wolves game, when we could have conceded a last-minute goal and when perhaps Wolves deserved to get something that day."

He added: “Purely because of work-rate, and we have the best defensive record in the league, all those things add up to where we are. Where we go from here is going to be down to momentum and injuries.”

I'm looking forward to getting back to football matters and come Saturday at 3pm none of the controversy that has gone on over the last few days will matter. It will pale into insignificance for 90 minutes at least and the attention will be back on that little green thing in the middle of the football ground.

I'm also looking forward to seeing us going to these grounds and having a go. We can do that because of our "lucky" start to the season against all those weaker teams in the self styled "strongest league in the world" you see. It could backfire, but we'll still have 25 points which is a massive massive bonus.

Bring back the football!