Three points, a clean sheet and a first win as Newcastle United’s manager made the 3-0 victory against Swansea City a perfect 56th birthday for Rafael Benítez.
“It’s a good present for me,” he said. “The table looks a little bit better now but you have to say congratulations to the players and congratulations to our fans. Hopefully we will have momentum now. Hopefully we can play with the same intensity and be lucky on Tuesday night.”
That is the evening when Manchester City visit St James’ Park and victory would lift Newcastle above Norwich City and Sunderland and out of the relegation zone.
“With the players working hard and working together and the fans pushing them on we can beat anyone,” said Benítez. “I think we can do it now. The team believes now. We will have to be at our best to win on Tuesday but we will fight until the end.”
Newcastle’s manager – who while praising an outstanding individual performance from Andros Townsend, who scored one goal and created the other two, stressed it was very much a “team” performance – had taken the controversial step of starting his £12m Swansea old boy Jonjo Shelvey on the bench.
With Shelvey having captained Newcastle in recent weeks, this prefaced an even more contentious decision, to give the latterly underachieving France midfielder Moussa Sissoko the armband. There was, though, methodology behind a piece of strategic thinking from Benítez, which arguably proved responsible for Newcastle playing as a team rather than a collection of disparate individuals.
“We have a lot of players who speak French in the dressing room and Sissoko’s very influential with them,” said Benítez. “We need someone like him who is a big name for them to lead the French players. Sissoko has a very influential relationship with other players – and he’s been really good on the training pitch.”
