“We’re working on some strategies to combat it, me and Alan have some things we’ve been talking about and we’ll be talking to the players about it on Wednesday and on Thursday. We need to start at a tempo.

“I do think, particularly for a home game where there will be a fantastic atmosphere, we’ve got to give the Geordie faithful something to go after.

“We’re going to put a few little bits and pieces in place that will allow us to know what we’re doing early on and allow us to play to our gameplan.

“I think we’re going to try to simplify it

early on for the first 20 or so minutes of the game. We have mentioned it – so far we’ve not done quite enough in the first halves, but hopefully we can do that against Portsmouth.

“I think it’s been well documented that we’ve tried to increase the intensity of things since we’ve been here. Everything that we’ve been doing has been at a greater tempo – training, preparation. Now we need to take that into games.”

United’s cause would be helped by having Barton and defender José Enrique back in the squad. Dowie sounded a positive note on the fitness of both.

“Them being available for the game would be a huge boost,” he said. “Joey trained with me on Monday – he did a bit of technical work with me. He’ll do the same with the manager on Tuesday afternoon. We’ll start trying to get him a bit closer to ‘all out’ training on Thursday.

“Jose Enrique is progressing nicely – we’ll see how that goes. Losing Jose has had a huge impact on us. We’ve had to switch things around and play a bit of different system because he’s not been available to us.”

Things are less hopeful on defender Steven Taylor, who looks unlikely to play against Portsmouth.

“We’ll wait and see what happens on this scan. We’re disappointed with the way that manifested itself but it’s one of those things,” Dowie said.