Owen said after the 4-1 thrashing of Spurs at White Hart Lane:

"You can't just come in and wave a magic wand and it's probably been better that way because it dampened down expectations. If we'd won every game, I think everyone would think we were going to win the league next year.

It's taken a bit of time for the manager to get his ideas across but now we're starting to get it together - and full credit to him for that.

To come and play an attacking line-up like he did at Tottenham and in the last couple of games has worked a treat so far. Obviously he's positive. He instils confidence in everyone and now we're reaping the rewards."

Chairman Chris Mort was full of praise for his leading goal scorer in a recent interview and said the following when asked whether he believed Owen would stay at the club.

"I would hope so. I think all the players are enjoying playing under Kevin, you can see that in the way they play and I would imagine Michael's in that camp as well; he seems to be enjoying his game.

He's got his contract this year and next year but it obviously makes sense to sit down with Michael and secure him for the long-term if we can.

The first things we do is, again not talking about any players in particular, sit down with the manager and decide what the manager wants to do because he is the one who has to make the end decision on these things but I know that Kevin is very fond of Michael so I would hope we can sit down and do something.

We are no different to any other big club in the Premier League; we'll sit down with the manager at the end of the season.

He will guide us on which players he would like to bring in, move on and we have deliberately gone out of our way to set up an infrastructure, we have had people looking at players throughout Europe over recent months and there will certainly be players in.

As Kevin has said, I think we have got a good quality set of players already but we will look to add to that in the summer.

We will sit down with Kevin; we are not going to do anything that isn't sensible for the long-term future of Newcastle United.

We are a big club and we have funds available, we have got a great supporter base so we will help Kevin in the summer but we are not going to do anything silly with the funds available to us."

When asked about recent speculation surrounding players currently not playing in the Premier League Mort said:

"We will sit down with the manager and have a chat with him about who he wants to bring in.

As I've said, everything we've done with the club we've looked to take a medium/long-term view so we are going to look for bringing in players who are going to be at Newcastle for a long time, so that is something we will look to do in the summer."

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