Newcastle United forward Ayoze Perez has claimed “something is wrong” at the club following their bad run of form, the Chronicle reports.
Rafa Benitez’s side have won just four of their last 23 games in all competitions and are set to take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge at the weekend – a ground in which they have won at just once in Premier League history.
The Magpies could only earn a replay at the weekend when they took on Championship side Blackburn Rovers in the third round of the FA Cup. Newcastle fell 1-0 down and were only spared defeat by a late Matt Ritchie penalty.
It was Perez that won the Penalty for North East club, but he slammed his side’s performance post-match.
Speaking to the Chronicle after the Blackburn game, Perez said:
It wasn’t good enough.
It was against a Championship team at home and we keep struggling at St James’ Park.
Something is wrong. It wasn’t good enough but we have to keep going now.
We have put ourselves in a tougher situation because now we have a replay.
It’s going to be a long January but we must stick together and face up to it.
Perez was then asked to explain what he meant by saying that something was “wrong” at the club, to which he answered:
I don’t know exactly but it is a strange thing.
You can’t struggle as much as we are in home games. That means something is wrong.
It is strange because there is no consistency, sometimes it is individual performances, sometimes it’s not like that and it’s team performance.
It can’t be individual every time as we have changed players and rotated. I think there is a piece of the jigsaw that is missing.
It is holding us back and it’s why we are struggling. We’ve won twice at home and that’s just not acceptable.
It’s not good enough so something should change.
Over 33,000 fans turned up to St James’ Park for game, with many fans criticising their side of appearing to not care about the Cup competition.
If they come through the replay at Ewood Park next week, Newcastle will take on fellow Premier League side Watford in the fourth round.
Perez went on to argue that the squad do care about the competition and the club:
We need to keep going in the competition and have to progress.
It is the toughest cup but we had a chance to go through against a Championship team at home and we should have taken it.
Then you see what you get.
Coming back to the performance it wasn’t good enough so we have to improve what we are lacking.
