United hit for six as freefall continues

Pressure piles on Pardew This isn't a match report of the like you'll be used to reading on here. To put it bluntly, I'm not quite sure anyone would want to recount the events of yesterday.

So for that reason I'm not going to bother and I'm going to have a moan instead. The facts are startling enough and the main one is that we lost 6-0 at home to Liverpool.

I've personally now got that sinking feeling and and I now firmly believe that our safety is now in the hands of the inability, or indeed ability, of other teams below us picking up points. I honestly can't see us getting another win this season and at the moment getting a draw is a stretch of the imagination so it's very much squeaky bum time on Tyneside as we await confirmation of which division we'll be gracing next season.

What I saw yesterday was nowhere near good enough. A 6-0 defeat is never good, but to not find one positive from a defeat like that and, perhaps more worryingly, see a side who are supposed to be fighting for their lives crumble so easily is alarming to say the least.

So where do we go from here? Put simply I don't know. I'm now at the point of backing the sacking of Alan Pardew after spending so much time teetering on the edge, but is it right to do it with three games to go? Do we get rid now and let John Carver have a go at motivating our players? There are risks associated with everything.

What's gone wrong? Have we collectively overestimated how good our French imports are? To put it another way, are they not as good as a lot of fans thought they were? I still believe they are good players, but they aren't being played in the right way and aren't being motivated enough which is the job of a manager in my book.

Yes you can say the players have a responsibility and should be motivated because that's their job, but we don't know if anything has happened behind the scenes to affect that. Most people in normal jobs would just get on wit it, but footballers aren't "normal" in that sense and need to be handled differently.

A dismal season is just getting worse and worse, and that real worrying thing is that it could still get worse. The threat of relegation still looms large and the result yesterday, although horrible to go through, will have very little to do with it in the grand scheme of things. If we go down it's because we've not been good enough all season, not because we lost 6-0 yesterday.

I, like everyone, just hope we don't have to go through relegation again...