Player Ratings: Newcastle Utd v Swansea (A)

Forum regular Mentalman has given his player ratings for today's performance against Swansea City. The 1-0 defeat against the Swans, produced good performances from Steven Taylor, who was man of the match and Moussa Sissoko, but showed that Yanga-Mbiwa needs games to get his confidence up.  Read on to see how the team faired and join the forum to have your say.  

Rob Elliot (6) - Pulled off some good saves and his kicking is good but he has a tendancy to go to ground and stay there.

Davide Santon (6.5) Great going forward as usual but his defending was poor, getting caught out of position and lacked composure for the goal!

Mapou Yanga-Mbiwa (6) did some great clearances but on a whole looked shaky.

***Steven Taylor (7.5) By far our best player on the day he looked really strong and ran the defence***

Mathieu Debuchy (7) Strong in defence and good going forward, pu in a few quality crosses unfortunately nobody could get onto the end of them!

Cheick Tiote (6) Very poor first half but got better in the second, gave the ball away too many times and got the yellow card we've come to expect.

Yohan Cabaye (6) Apart from 1 good shot and getting booked the only other thing i can remember him doing in the match was about 8 shockingly bad corners, there's no wonder we are'nt a threat from corners.

Jonas Gutierrez (6.5) As always put a shift in without doing anything spectacular.

Yoan Gouffran (6.5) He was a threat throughout the match and helped out defensively although he missed a sitter!

Moussa Sissoko (7.5) Yet again he was our best attacking player and everything went through him .

Papiss Cisse (6.5) Missed a couple of chances that he should have scored, played well overall but he's coming too deep too often if he's going to be playing as a lone striker, still offside a lot but not as much as he used to!

MATCH PREVIEW/STATS/THREAD HERE