By Matthew Jones
January 1 2004

Newcastle boss Sir Bobby Robson is detirmined not to let the critics affect the confidence of his players ahead of Saturday's trip to Southampton for their FA Cup third round tie.

FA CUP PREPERATION

The Magpies left the pitch to boos on Saturday after losing 1-0 to Blackburn Rovers and several critics have written off United's chances of claiming a European place.

Sir Bobby however, said: "The knockers can knock, that's the nature of football. They can knock and knock, but we won't listen to them.

But I won't let anyone do us down or dent our confidence, and we'll go into Saturday's game looking top bounce back from two disappointing games.

"Since the start of the season we have had a remarkable run to get up onto the fringe of fourth place, and had we won on Sunday we'd have been one point away from fourth. We didn't win, and as a result we're three or four points away, but there's still an awful lot of football to be played.

"We know two goals in three games isn't good enough, but it's a collective thing. The defence have to do their job and the attack have to do theirs.

"If you take away the goalkeepers you have 10 versus 10 individual battles on the pitch. If you lose seven of those battles then you're struggling, it's all about winning them.

"On Sunday against Blackburn it was one of those games where it didn't go for us, but I couldn't come off and say to one of my players 'you didn't do enough' because that wasn't the case."

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