RAFAEL BENITEZ has called on the Newcastle players and fans to work together over the final six matches of the season so that when those in charge look back over the campaign, they do so still as a Premier League club.

The part that the fans must play is the simple one – get behind the team. The players must find a way to score the first goal in games so that confidence does not drain away as it did at St Mary's on Saturday.

“The fans will be crucial for us,” Benitez said. “We need them pushing the players and supporting the players, and at the end of the season we will have time to analyse what was going wrong.

“At the moment it is just a single mistake, an individual mistake, that is killing the team mentally. So we have to be sure that for the next game we don’t make mistakes at the beginning and hopefully we get chances and we can score and it will be different.”

It needs to be. Benitez has seen his new team take only one point from his four matches in charge, but they need to win two of the remaining six matches just to draw level on points with 17th-placed Norwich. It is more likely that the Toon will need four victories, starting with Saturday's visit of Swansea City.

“Almost every game we must approach as thinking it is a must-win game,” he said. “But you can’t control what the other teams will do. If they lose some games maybe it will be enough with four games. If they continue winning games, then maybe you need to win five. And if you lose it doesn’t matter.

“We have to start [by] winning the first one. And if you see the team fighting like they did in the second half against Sunderland, Norwich and today, and we score a goal, then you can get these three points that are crucial for us. Then we will have more belief and confidence and the players will realise that we can do it.

“We don’t need to be the best team in the Premier League but we have to be the best team in the bottom four. We are not doing that at the moment. We have got to start doing that quickly.”

Benitez, of course, knows about rescuing apparently hopeless causes, having overseen Liverpool's recovery to win the Champions League final against AC Milan in 2005 after being 3-0 down at half-time. But he refused to be drawn into parallels.

“This is different,” he said. “When you are working with a team for one year, you know what you can expect from everyone and they know what they can expect from you. In this case we have players coming back from injuries and then you lose another player and you have to adapt quickly to different situations depending on the games.

“Still I think we have enough quality in the squad to do better than the other teams.”