"Gary Speed was enormous for us because he's been ill midweek and was ill this morning. I got a message at 12 o'clock saying he was not very well and was coming in but unlikely to play.

"He felt a bit better by the time he arrived and I decided I would take a chance with him for half an hour and if he had to come off after half an hour, then he had to come off.

"He played all the match and fought hard for us and was outstanding in terms of that.

"Alan did very well for us. In my head, I was thinking `Can I take him off with 20 minutes to go?' because we have a tough match on Thursday and he's 33, but I couldn't do it.

"It was a rousing, typical Premiership game of football that you get very, very often. We got off to a great start, naturally.

"Craig took the chance, he went round the goalkeeper this time, as opposed to trying to pass the ball past the goalkeeper, so he's learnt.

"We allowed Radzinski to turn on the ball by the touchline when he ought really to have been put in the third row and use his right foot to set up Gravesen.

"It was 1-1 and I think at that stage the team who scores the next goal wins the match.

"It could have been Everton if they'd scored because you never know how it's going to go then, 2-1 down at home, but we got it and we went on to win it.

"We've won 4-2, we're back to fourth - great.

Two-goal Alan Shearer said:

Of his first and our third:

"These are the most difficult ones to score when you have a lot of time to think about it.To be fair to Everton keeper Nigel Martyn, he closed the angle down and the only way was to place my shot through his legs and that's what I did.

"Everton made it tough for us and we got out of jail when Steve Watson's header was disallowed for offside which did not look to be the correct decision.

"We still have that annoying habit of conceding silly goals. This meant that the alarms bells were ringing late on. It was a sloppy goal to give away and I hope it does not come back to haunt us.

"That's how it is at the moment, and while it was not a vintage performance from us, we dug out the result and really I never thought the result was in doubt.

"We got three points and my son Will was our mascot. All that was missing is that I did not back the winner of the Grand National."

"It was a goal. We're fortunate enough to have been able to watch it on the laptop and it's a goal.

"We're certainly due some, we're certainly due a wee bit of good fortune, albeit we'd been on a run of five games unbeaten.

"If it hadn't been for dreadful individual mistakes - I didn't see Jonathan Woodgate or Titus Bramble make the mistakes our defenders made - we might have got something out of the game.

"I thought we could have and in a lot of ways, maybe should have. But we've given it a go. We didn't give in and we have to take some things from it.

"I think we're a good enough side to get away from this region, but you have to prove it on the field. That's where it counts."

Former Magpie Watson commented:

"It was a massive disappointment to lose the game but that's as well as we have played in a long time.

"I thought we created as many chances as we had done home or away for a long time. Joseph (Yobo) hit the bar early in the second half, Tomasz (Radzinski) had a few offsides against him in the first and I scored a goal, which wasn't offside.

"We have had a look at it on the computer from every possible angle. I was onside or if not at worst level when Tommy's crossed it.

"I was inches away from another and then there were a couple of headers from Radz and Kev Kilbane, so we had a load of chances. The difference was that when they got their four chances they put them away.

"I don't think the final scoreline reflected our performance though there was one difference between the teams and it will be no surprise to hear it was Shearer.

"I thought that we could have come away from St James' with the points if it wasn't for Alan and though I don't want to harp on about it, some bad errors from us for their goals.

"To be fair we got it back to 3-2 and I think the final goal was maybe because we had committed everybody forward, so perhaps it should have ended up like that.

"But as I say we are massively disappointed after the way we played and I think we can take a lot of heart out of the performance but obviously not the result."

PSV assistant coach Fred Rutten will have left Tyneside after this match scratching his head at what he'd witnessed.

As a diversionary tactic designed to fox the Dutch ahead of Thursday's game we certainly served up the footballing equivalent of removing all the road signs, while still claiming the three points so desperately required.

In ninety minutes-worth of football, he'd seen United offer up a mixture of brilliance and mediocrity, skill and stupidity - with a dash of seemingly wilful eccentricity from the former PSV boss now in charge of us, who at one point was reduced to sticking his fingers in his ears when crowd unrest grew around him (not to mention more than one player also expressing his feelings on the matter....) 

But what the Dutch observer cannot fail to have noted is that Alan Shearer remains a potent threat when presented with the ball in a shooting position. Whether Laurent Robert is the player to put the ball there though is less certain - on today's display it was more likely to be Given as the Frenchman had another quiet day at l'office.

Bellamy though continues to do good work - improving on his haphazard end product to give us the lead, linking up with Shearer on a more regular basis and almost keeping his trap shut, with only occasional rants and moans rather than the running commentary he seemed to be giving at times before his last enforced absence from proceedings.

Certainly while Bellamy and Shearer continue to hit the target, Shola will have to be content with moaning to the press and annoying his manager - and wandering on to skip around for the final few minutes of this game won't have done a lot for his chances of a recall. 

And as for Michael Bridges; his most impressive contribution this year in a Newcastle match remains the twenty-odd minutes as a sub he played against us for Leeds in January. Missing again from this game with a shin problem, three sub appearances totalling 35 minutes, plus a 73 minute spell in midfield won't have aided his bid to gain a contract with us, or anybody else.

Back to this game though and the PSV observer will also have written in his scouting report that we appeared to be petrified by corners taken from our left side. Three times in the second half the ball was swung over from the East Stand/Leazes corner and three times we were utterly at sea. Yobo somehow grazed the bar with the first, only Kilbane will know how he ballooned his unchallenged header wide and finally it was Yobo again, notching his first-ever Everton goal, as we played statues on the back post with Dyer the leader.

A one-man Everton midfield at times outshone our twinkling stars, as the industry of Gravesen threatened to give the visitors a toehold in this match both before and after his goal - if Swap Shop was still on, there would hopefully be calls to Noel Edmonds from this region offering a Bowyer for a Gravesen...plus a pogostick.

On a serious note, Gravesen may not be everyone's cup of char and would certainly have to win friends among the Gallic elements of our dressing room for starters, but there's no denying his effort and contribution in this game - he's just about everything we thought we were getting when we signed Bowyer and despite his Brian Glover haircut is less than a year older than our number 29 (latest theory: in an administrative mix-up we have actually signed Ian Bowyer, not Lee....) 

Back to that finger-in-the-ear gesture from the manager though and the bemusement caused by Robson's failure to replace the temporarily absent Speed (off getting stitches in a facial wound) with Bowyer, who came on while we were down to ten men, in place of Ambrose.

So what can we glean from this? That in Robson's opinion, a midfielder who had literally climbed off his sick bed to play having missed a midweek international through illness is so vital to our cause that we tread water waiting for him to be patched up and sent back out on to the field, handing Everton the initiative in the process that they thankfully weren't able to fully grab.

On another level, it also places the position of Viana under question again. Stuck on the bench at Mallorca and Bolton until the latter stages and now considered incapable of making an impact against a depleted Toffee's team on our own patch - surely this should have been tailor-made for him? If not now, when? I'm hearing the word Gavilan again....

This was a great result and a satisfying day - but only if you place it in the context of the victory only and fail to address the wider elements that continue to bemuse and perplex even seasoned toon watchers. Or backed the National winner. 

Along with the visit of Wolves, this looked the least taxing of our remaining domestic fixtures - and we still threatened to make heavy weather of it at times. 

Once again though, the number nine did his job when called upon - would Dyer have scored his first? Doubtful given that he wouldn't even take responsibility to have a shot when presented with a chance just before Shearer's second and clinching strike.

With Arsenal, PSV and Chelsea next in line to occupy the away dressing room, something vaguely cataclysmic will have to have happened if we're still defending that unbeaten home record in 2004 by the time Carl Cort comes back to the crime scene. Either way, it's a fair bet that our own version of the SAS - Shearer and Speed - will have been at the heart of things. Reassuring in one way, depressing in another.