Souness will stay and fight

He's clinging on - personally, I think it's pointless changing our manager so soon, after he's spent all the money, and we don't really have any viable alternatives. We need to find someone, and let him do his job for a few years, so he can get it right. If you think back, Alex Ferguson nearly got fired a couple of times, coz his first year or two were pretty bad, and then he went on this run of having the dominant team for about 10 years. And given how many injuries we currently have, any team would be struggling, not just ours.

Anyway, here's the transcript of the Sky interview Souness gave yesterday

It's not helpful. It's not helpful when local newspapers give my players two out of ten and come out with nonsense like they should never wear the black and white shirt again. They're critical of the players themselves and that hurts them. It's critical of the football club, the chairman who backed whatever player was brought in for x amount and it puts enormous pressure on the players.

"Players are always the most important people at a football club and they continually get caned, in my opinion, most unfairly.

"The person who has written that (about Carr) has got another agenda. He wants to make as much mischief for me as possible. I accept that and bring it on.

"If that individual thinks the relationship I have with him, being asked to do it every day, to help him do his job, is so, when it suits him, he can stick it so far up my backside it comes out of the top of my head.

My principle is that you help me, I help you. If you don't help me, why should I help you?

"That story was so far off the mark but it led to great mischief for me. Stephen Carr and I haven't had a bust-up. We've spoken but a bust-up suggests we were about to fight with each other and that has never happened."

"I can assure the fans that, when a game starts, I am for that 90 minutes, the biggest fan Newcastle has. I feel tremendous responsibility and have always tried to do whatever job to the best of my abilities. It's how I approach this one. I am the man in possession of this seat right now and I will give everything I've got to be successful. We'll leave no stone unturned to try and bring success to this club.

"The chants aren't helpful. I've been in the business a very long time and I don't think anyone can say or write anything about me that hasn't already been said. We do it because we love football and want to do it. I still love football, going to games, watching the boys training and matchdays.

"As long as I feel that, I'll always do it. It's not helpful but I'm only interested in the players on the pitch and how it will affect them. I've got broad shoulders and always manage to live with what has been said before.

"I bet I'm the only manager in the Premier League who's not had a single player knock on my door on a Friday and say: 'Why am I not in the team?' Nobody's done anything wrong here. If I could go back six months, I'd still sign the same players, the ones who have left, bar two, I wanted them out of the door. Training maybe we should have moved to the academy sooner but we've done that now. There's not too much I would change here.

"Lady luck has decided it's not for us at this moment in time. It's not the time your head blows off your shoulders but it's time for everyone to stick together and what can you do but work harder?

"As you know, I don't read a lot of newspapers. I understand certain individuals have gone down the road that my days are numbered.

"My attitude to it is just keep working away. When I got this job, you don't get any job really unless they've got lots of problems. I inherited a very difficult situation, a very difficult dressing room and I sorted the dressing room out and got rid of some dodgy characters.

"We have a very strong dressing room now. Most of the players who left, we wanted to leave. One or two, we would much preferred to have stayed but they made it plain they wanted to leave so, unfortunately, they did.

"We brought in some very good players but unfortunately this injury situation has killed us. I'm not hiding behind the injuries as some fool has written, the facts are we have been decimated by injuries.

"Two things happen when you can't put your strongest team onto the pitch. A - you can't play the kind of football you want to play and B - you won't get the same results.

"I'm here, I'll remain here until somebody else tells me differently. I think we have a group of players very much together at this moment in time. I can reassure the fans we're working as hard as we possibly can to win as many games as we can.

"Right now, we find ourselves in a difficult situation, eight of our top men are missing. There's not a club in the country who could withstand that sort of damage to our squad - not Chelsea, not Arsenal, not Manchester United.

"I spoke to him (Shepherd) yesterday,. From my point of view, it's fine. We had a meeting and spoke about the possibility of new players and things we would like to do on that front.

"That was the general theme of the chat we had.

"I think that (the pressure) is the price on the ticket of the manager of Newcastle United.

Certain aspects of the job are extremely difficult, more difficult than at any other football club.

Circumstances here which prevail don't prevail at any other football club.

I won't go into detail on that but it makes managing Newcastle very difficult.

"I think we have, right now, some of our very best players at this club not playing. If you look at Arsenal, the general consensus if Arsenal are not the same team as one player isn't there any more. We're missing seven and eight, five and six, and what does that do to our team? It's not going to be the team we thought we were going to be with those people missing."