Fergie to keep rotating keepers

Manchester United boss Alex Ferguson was impressed by David de Gea’s midweek performance but will continue rotating his goalkeepers for the immediate future.

De Gea, who joined United last year, was dropped after the opening two Premier League games of the season.

The Spaniard has returned in the Champions League and Capital One Cup but has lost his number one status, with Anders Lindegaard taking over for the last four league matches.

Ferguson must now decide whether to retain De Gea, 21, after he played at Cluj on Tuesday or switch back to Dane Lindegaard, 28, for tomorrow’s trip to Newcastle.

Ferguson said: “He (De Gea) was excellent, he is an outstanding goalkeeper, the young lad, he is getting better all the time.

“I don’t know whether I should play him on Sunday or not but the way we have been doing it in the last few weeks has worked quite well for us.

“Everybody wants to play, goalkeepers are no different, but the way I look at it at the moment is getting the two of them experience will help me in the long term.

“Obviously at some stage one of them will take over if he shows a real consistency in top-level performance and he has shown a maturity.

“At the moment neither of them have got that big-game experience. They will get that in time.”

Ferguson added: “Peter Schmeichel was 27 when he joined us. Everyone was talking about a young goalkeeper joining us but he was 27, and he gave us eight great years.

“Goalkeepers can play until their late 30s quite easily, look at Brad Friedel for instance, and Peter Shilton played in the 1990 World Cup and I think he was 40.’’

When United last visited Tyneside they crashed to a 3-0 defeat in January but they responded with a run of 11 wins and a draw.

Ferguson is looking for his team to be similarly inspired as they take on the Magpies on the back of last week’s 3-2 loss to Tottenham.

Ferguson said: “In the second half of the season we had to do something, when you lose a game you have to do something.

“We lost a game to Tottenham and we have to recover again. Hopefully we can get the result.

“It won’t be easy, it is always a difficult place to go, Newcastle. I think under Alan Pardew they have become a really committed team.

“But after what happened in the game against Tottenham we need to get on the road in terms of recovery.”

Newcastle strikers Demba Ba and Papiss Cisse, meanwhile, have been warned not to take their places for granted as they prepare for United’s visit.

The Senegalese pair, who scored 29 goals between them last season, are both up and running once again with Ba having plundered six already during the current campaign and Cisse claiming his second in a little more than a week in Thursday night’s 3-0 Europa League victory over Bordeaux.

However, while the African duo have been near certain starters for much of their time together on Tyneside, Pardew has warned them that 30-year-old Shola Ameobi, who captained the team and scored against the Frenchmen, is a genuine threat to their continued partnership.

He said: “All our strikers have scored this week — Shola has scored, Demba has scored, Papiss has scored and if I am honest, Shola is playing at the same level as the other two and he is in contention to start this game.

“That’s great news for us because it breeds competition.”