JOHN CARVER has defended his decision to give his under-performing Newcastle United players a two-day break in the wake of last weekend’s damaging defeat at QPR, and claimed it would have been counter-productive to read the riot act ahead of Sunday’s relegation decider against West Ham.

Despite Saturday’s defeat at Loftus Road leaving Newcastle’s Premier League status hanging by a thread ahead of the final game of the season, the club’s players did not return to the training ground until Tuesday morning, with Carver coming in for heavy criticism after he spent Monday attending a charity golf day at Close House.

The Magpies head coach has defended his decision to support CHUF, the charity that raises money for the Children’s Heart Unit at the Freeman Hospital, and also believes he was right to give his players some time to clear their heads following a run of nine defeats from their last ten matches.

He adopted a much more aggressive approach in the wake of this month’s disastrous 3-0 defeat at Leicester, but after that failed to produce the response he had been looking for, he concluded it would be pointless to make the same moves again.

“I don’t think bringing in them just to tear a strip off them would have achieved anything,” said Carver, who has described Sunday’s game as Newcastle’s biggest for six years. “That’s definite. I did that after the Leicester game, and you can’t really say that it worked.

“I’ve done it, and you can only do it so many times. You have to try to find different ways of dealing with different situations. That’s why I did what I did, and I stick by it 100 per cent.

“My exact thinking was that I thought the preparation was perfect before the West Brom game, so I decided I was going to mirror that. In the past, we’ve had three days leading into a game, four days leading into a game, and it hasn’t worked.

“It would be normal to train on a Monday and Tuesday, have a Wednesday off, and then train on the Thursday and Friday leading in to the Saturday. That’s a normal week for most football clubs. With this game being on a Sunday you work backwards, so the Monday became the day off.

“From a psychological point of view, it also gave the players a chance to clear their heads and start again. Sometimes, you need that, and to be honest, maybe some of the staff needed a bit of time away from it as well.

“Sometimes, the break is better than coming in and just going through the motions. What’s the point of bringing them in just for the sake of it?”

Carver’s presence on the golf course was immediately seized upon by a number of Newcastle fans as proof that the head coach had effectively given up attempting to train and motivate a group of players he has previously conceded “might not be listening to him”.

The boyhood Newcastle fan strenuously denies that is the case, and having been criticised when he was part of a senior Magpies delegation that pulled out of the same charity day two years ago, Carver feels he would have been pilloried no matter what he did on Monday morning.

“When you attend a charity golf day, you do it because we made over £500,000 for the heart foundation to buy at least five scanners to save childrens’ lives,” he said. “I’m proud of that.

“It didn’t affect our preparations, and I’ve spoken to quite a lot of managers, and they weren’t in on Sunday or Monday either. I have a clear conscience. We pulled out of this charity day two years ago and were criticised, so you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.”

Be that as it may, Carver accepts the criticism of the last couple of days will be nothing compared to what will be directed at Newcastle’s staff and players if the club is unable to retain its top-flight status on Sunday.

The 50-year-old was watching on television in a pub when an Alan Shearer-led Newcastle were relegated in 2009, but a number of senior staff remain from six years ago, along with Tim Krul, Fabricio Coloccini, Ryan Taylor and Jonas Gutierrez, who were all part of the squad that lost to Aston Villa.

Carver presided over a team meeting with a difference on Tuesday morning, with some of those who were present at Villa Park invited to outline their memories and ram home the trauma of relegation to the rest of the squad.

“I invited in the travelling staff, what you might term the senior staff – the kit men, masseurs, doctors, physios,” he said. “A lot of those people were here when the club got relegated.

“I wanted to give everybody an opportunity to have their say, but this week is about being as positive as we can. Forget about what’s gone on in the past, this is effectively a season in a week now.

“I said straight out, ‘If anybody doesn’t fancy it, if anybody wants to back-bite, if anybody wants to be negative – there’s the door’. Steve Stone opened the door, and I told them to leave the room. I told them I was ready for a fight and a challenge, and not one person got up and left.”