Steve Bruce: “It’s very difficult for all of us to take, for all of us who have seen us play all season.
"We turned up and for me only three or four performed to the level of which I’m used to seeing.
“We were simply blown away by a far, far superior Newcastle team
“If I’m being brutally honest a few of them got caught up in the whole occasion and didn’t perform to the level which we’ve seen over the last three or four months, with only three or four out of eleven you’ve got no chance of winning the big derby game.
“For me at time it looked like men against boys and everything that went wrong or could go possibly wrong did.
"Red cards, penalty decisions, deflected goals, the whole thing was thrown at us in the space of an hour and a half.
“We’ve all taken big bad beatings, maybe not as difficult as this one to take.
"The one thing you have to do is just dust yourself down and get ready to get back up again and we need to do it quickly because we’ve got a lot of repairing to do.
“After witnessing that, all we can do is apologise as a group and I personally can take the whole flak. We were simply blown away by a far, far superior Newcastle team.”