The Magpies face a fight to secure their Champions League ticket via the Premier League
Newcastle United head coach Eddie Howe
Newcastle United head coach Eddie Howe(Image: Prime Video)
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Eddie Howe has warned his Newcastle United stars not to put all their eggs in one basket in the Champions League.
Winning the trophy would be a huge ask for Newcastle, but their route back to the Champions League via the Premier League places is just as tough with a nine-point gap between Howe's Magpies and the top five.
With upcoming home games against Everton and Manchester United in the next week, six points on Tyneside is a must or the top five dream could quickly fade away.
After seeing off Qarabag 9-3 in the Champions League play-offs to set up a last 16 battle with Chelsea or Barcelona, Howe must now try to get his team back on track in the Premier League.
He said: "Of course, we want to be in Europe every season and the best way for us to get there is to try to win as many games as we can.
"Our Premier League form, we're desperate to get that back on track.
"We need to get that back on track, we need to get in that feeling of winning regularly. That's the only thing that's going to help us when we return to the Champions League.
"This competition is an amazing thing for us this year, and you just never know what surprises football can bring you. We'll just attack everything and try to do our best."
Newcastle fans are allowing themselves to dream of more European trips with the prospect of Geordie fans invading the Nou Camp the hope for many.
With the final in Budapest - the city of Newcastle's last European trophy win in 1969 - there is also hope that it could be an omen on May 30 when the UEFA showpiece takes place at the Puskas Arena.
And while Howe was eager to get the focus back on what could be deemed an ailing Premier League campaign, with Newcastle in the bottom half, he won't dampen the dream of a glory night in Hungary either.
He said: "We want to go as far as we can and why not? I think we're good enough to do it.
"We have raised our game – there's no denying that – at times this season.
"Even in the Carabao Cup, I thought we produced some really good performances in the one-off games.
"The disappointment for us has been when we've returned to the Premier League, and we're desperate for the consistency there.
"We haven't been able to do that, so we want to obviously find a remedy to that, but we want to continue to go far in this."
Howe had suffered boos in his previous home game before Qarabag after the Magpies lost 3-2 to Brentford.
When asked how he turned jeers to cheers in the space of a couple of home games, he said: We've just tried to go very much to go to basics and the fundamentals of our performance, and I think you could see that in the Tottenham game and in the Qarabag [away] game, where we were really front-foot, we were really good athletically, and when we're really good athletically, I think you can see then out quality comes out.
“I didn't really feel that today, to be honest. I don't know whether the two early goals took us away from where we needed to be because we were a bit lethargic from that point onwards. But I think that's been the fundamental part of our recovery.
“When I go to the Aston Villa game, we were really, really good athletically, really good intensity to everything that we asked the players to do.
“We're scoring goals, we've just got to defend better. That's got to be at the back of our minds now to bring long-term success to this season."
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