Manchester United defender Jonny Evans was delighted with his goal at Newcastle United yesterday.

The Northern Irish defender connected with Robin van Persie's left-wing corner at the Sports Direct Arena to seal his first goal of the season and only the second of his Reds career.

"As a defender, you want clean sheets but scoring a goal put a bit of gloss on my own performance so it was nice to chip in," Evans told MUTV. "As soon as I made a connection with it I thought it was going in, so I was delighted with that and hopefully I can add a few more.

"You could see by the way that we started that we wanted to come out and put on a good performance. I think the main thing was that we defended and attacked as a team. We were a real unit out there and we made it hard for a good Newcastle side.

"They had big powerful lads with good goal scoring records, especially up at the Sports Direct Arena. We knew we were in for a hard game but we were up for the challenge and thankfully we were able to keep a clean sheet.

"We were seven points behind Chelsea (before the game) so it was a big gap and if we had dropped points it would have been a big task. Although it is still early on in the season, you don't want to give a team that kind of advantage so early on."