Newcastle United boss Alan Pardew admits Jonas Gutierrez's cancer battle has brought the club together.
During his celebrations for yesterday's brace against Hull City, Papiss Cisse unveiled a tee-shirt bearing the message 'Always looking forward, Jonas', a reference to team-mate Gutierrez's ongoing battle with testicular cancer.
Pardew admitted Gutierrez's fight, which became public this week, had helped to unite the squad, and thanked the supporters who had exercised such restraint during a difficult afternoon.
He said: "I have to say thank you to them for that because big sections of our fans more or less took a neutral position today.
"I don't expect them to have been supporting me or in any way wanting to cheer for me personally, but I think they just took a view of loving their football club and just seeing what happened today, and I think we did enough on the pitch to win a few friends today.
"I think our fans are realistic - they know the top six is beyond us. We can't compete with those clubs at the moment. But we should be competing for seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, we have proven that we can do that in the past.
"We are well short of it at the moment and I am not going to jump up and down here for a 2-2 draw at home to Hull, but it's a stepping stone to that area where this club needs to be."
