I want to start by thanking you from your support in recent games. We’ve travelled 8000 miles over the last eight games, and you’ve been with us all the way. Our support home and away is always amazing, but especially knowing that there are people who were in Baku last week and will have also been there at Manchester City on Saturday, it’s a testament to the club and how much people of Newcastle love the club.

It’s honestly amazing, and we know we’ve probably not always got the results this season that have warranted the amount of money you have spent to follow us away. Hopefully the last few games have made some amends to that a little bit and we’ll hopefully do that more.

We spoke as a group after the Brentford game that we really wanted to focus and put in the work for each other – and the manager as well. We were all disappointed as a team and we felt like we let him down, so we owed it to him to put in the work and turn it around. I don’t think we’ve played unbelievably in all of the games since but we’ve shown a lot more character and a much better mentality to get through those different circumstances away from home.

Last week at Qarabağ, we knew the first leg would be a tough game knowing how well they had done at home against Chelsea and against other clubs in Europe. So it makes all the travelling and preparations sweeter with how we played. We’re really happy with how we performed, especially the first half.

It’s a cliché but we also know that the tie isn’t over. We know that Qarabağ can cause us problems and we have to be professional tonight. It’s always great going into any second leg with the type of lead that we have, but we’re not naïve to think that we can turn up and expect to win this game.

And I know us as a group, we’re not like that. We’re very professional and we’ve got a good mentality so I’m confident that we’ll be ready to go tonight. Anything can happen in knockout football, but we feel as though we can compete with anybody. We’ve shown that, especially against Paris Saint-Germain, how good we can be. I think we elevate our game going into those games because there are bigger, better teams at this stage of the competition.

Of course, knockout football in the Champions League is something we’ve never done before in our history. Once you’re in the competition, you don’t really come out and look at how big an achievement it is. We know the fans will come out push us along in the stands to help us get through.

We always fancy ourselves at home. We’ve lost more home games than we’d like this season but we are always very confident going into these games, knowing that the fans can help us. I’m always told that it’s such an intimidating place to come from players I know, so let’s continue that into this run of home games together over the next few weeks.

Dan Burn.