ALAN PARDEW has likened Newcastle United’s current form to that of tennis star Andy Murray – and is hoping the Magpies serve up another winning display against Liverpool this lunch-time.

Successive victories over Leicester City and Tottenham, in the Premier League, and Manchester City, in the fourth round of the Capital One Cup, have transformed the mood on Tyneside and ensured the Magpies will head into today’s home game brimming with confidence.

After two months of torment, Newcastle suddenly finally themselves heading in the right direction, and Pardew had drawn parallels between his own players’ performances and those of Murray, who claimed his 20th win in 22 matches on Thursday afternoon as he beat Grigor Dimitrov to guarantee his place at the end-of-season ATP World Tour Finals.

Murray’s run has taken him to tournaments he might not ordinarily have entered, and while Newcastle’s official club policy is to downplay the importance of the cup competitions, Pardew concedes that this season’s three Capital One Cup wins have played a crucial role in generating the momentum required to help haul the club out of the Premier League’s bottom three.

“I’ve always thought the same since I first became a manager,” said Pardew. “Momentum is the key to success in sport. I give the example of Andy Murray. You can see at the moment that he’s entered tournaments that might not normally be on his agenda, but he wants to win them because there’s a big one coming up at the end of the season and he wants to be in form for it.

“I watch him playing tennis, and this is a guy in form, reaching shots he shouldn’t reach and going for shots he wouldn’t normally go for. That is a guy with momentum, and I think that’s how managers approach every game.

“You want to build momentum, and we have great momentum at the moment. There’s no way we could have won at Manchester City if we hadn’t won at Spurs. The momentum is the key, so if you’re asking me do I favour the cups or the Premier League, I favour momentum.”

Maintaining that momentum this afternoon will be difficult given that Liverpool have scored eight goals on their last two visits to Tyneside, although Brendan Rodgers’ side are hardly travelling to the North-East in fantastic form following a run of just three wins from nine matches in all competitions.

Newcastle’s most recent home game resulted in the 1-0 win over Leicester that represented their first Premier League success of the season, but Pardew has highlighted the previous outing at St James’ Park, when two late goals from Papiss Cisse secured a 2-2 draw with Hull City, as a pivotal point of the season.

The Magpies manager never lost faith in his ability to turn things around despite the mounting calls for his head, but he concedes that life would have been extremely difficult had Cisse not grabbed a dramatic late double after coming off the substitutes’ bench.

“As an experienced manager, I’ve experienced difficult times before,” he said. “Not perhaps with the scale of the media criticism that I was receiving, but certainly in terms of results. I’ve had results like that at Charlton and West Ham, and you have to try to find a solution.

“If you don’t believe you’re strong enough as a character to find a solution, then don’t do the job. I’m confident I can do this job, and I was always confident I could turn it around. But you still hinge on critical moments, and for me, this season’s critical moment was Hull.

“People might talk about the win over Leicester, but possibly Hull, when the two goals went in and we went from a defeat to a draw, was the key. Suddenly, we were feeling good about ourselves and Papiss had come back. We got two goals, so it was a case of, ‘Right, here we go, now we can kick on’. I’m not saying that was a game changer, but I think it was a significant moment.”

Liverpool supporters will be hoping that Mario Balotelli’s first domestic goal in a Liverpool shirt against Swansea on Tuesday night will prove an equally influential moment in their own club’s season.

Having scored against Ludogorets in the Champions League in September, the Italian finally broke an eight-game barren run as Liverpool came from behind to reach the League Cup quarter-finals this week, but Pardew is adamant the striker’s quality was never in question despite some below-par recent displays.

“I think he's a great player, I really do,” he said. “When I've seen the really, really big games come along, he has delivered for Italy and Manchester City. I think big games turn him on a little bit.

“It's probably the other games where you really need to focus on him, and I think that's probably an area he needs to improve on. But I think we're a big game, we're on the telly, he's under a lot of pressure, so I'm very wary of him, because he can deliver on those days.”