ALAN Shearer last night complained about his players’ lack of urgency as Newcastle United slipped another step closer to relegation following a 1-0 defeat at Tottenham Hotspur.

Although the Magpies finished the game strongly and were a shade unfortunate not to snatch an equaliser through substitute Obafemi Martins, they were poor for most of the first half.

That sluggish start did not go down well with Shearer, who admitted Newcastle will have to win all three of their remaining home games to have any chance of staying in the top flight following Darren Bent’s first-half goal.

He said: “It was a familiar story. I asked them for a reaction at half time and they gave me that. I said to them after the game, ‘I’m very pleased with the second half, but give me an explanation why there’s no urgency like that from minute one.

“We have our own ideas about that, but we’re going to keep them to ourselves. We have to start games from the first minute like we finish them in the 90th.

“At the minute, we’re looking to do that, but it hasn’t materialised. Effort-wise, I have no complaints. You’ve seen the urgency and the spark in the second half, and you’ve seen the belief that they can pass it around. I want them to do that for 90 minutes, then we’ll have a chance of taking three points instead of one or none. I still believe that we have enough.

“I know that everyone’s been looking to our home games for the last nine or ten games, and that’s no different now. We have to win those three home games.

“I think we have to win all three of them now – they are all must-win games.”

Newcastle’s performance improved dramatically once Mark Viduka and Obafemi Martins emerged from the substitutes’ bench, but Shearer insisted his hands were tied at the moment because of their lack of fitness and an injury to the club’s only specialist left-back, Jose Enrique.

He explained: “I changed it around by putting Oba and Mark Viduka on and they helped change things. It would have been very difficult to have started with those two because of their fitness.

“But I thought they changed the game and gave us a bigger threat going forward. We didn’t really have that in the first half.