Steven Gerrard: Newcastle victory should have been bigger

Gerrard made the initial breakthrough to end 30 minutes of skirmishing and set Liverpool on the way to their best away win for four years after home goalkeeper Shay Given produced a string of superb saves to threaten an inspired day to keep the leaders at bay.

But once the defences had been breached, Liverpool went on to reflect their superiority with a five-star goal haul.

"We've been threatening that sort of scoreline for a while," the skipper told the club website. "We've had a lot of chances in games without being clinical but today we were.

"Having said that, we could have had more and the disappointing thing at half-time was that we hadn't scored more goals. We could have been three or four up but they have a world-class goalkeeper and full credit to Shay for some of the saves he made. That's our only disappointment after the game, that the scoreline could have been more emphatic.

"That's the standard we have at Liverpool.

"We don't milk results, we always look for the positives and the negatives. There weren't many negatives, but we could have had a few more goals."

Liverpool's victory - allied to Fulham's late leveller to peg back chasing Chelsea - means Rafael Benitez's men have a three-point advantage at the top of the table but Gerrard knows the second half of the campaign will produce plenty of challenges to their front-running role.

"If we want to stay at the top and get involved in the title race then we're going to have to deal with the pressure," he added. "We have big footballers and big players here.

"There are a lot of tests and challenges to come but if we keep playing as we did today we will be there at the end. There is a confidence but there's still a lot of hard work to do and a lot of hurdles to get over if we want to stay where we are."

Meanwhile Liverpool assistant manager Sammy Lee believes confidence is growing in the camp that they can win the Barclays Premier League title.

Asked if Liverpool have it in them to win the title this year, Lee, who did just that with the club as a player, said: "We feel we have. The sides I played in - it seems such a long time ago, it was in black and white when I played.

"All I will say to you is we feel this is a very strong, very focused, very determined bunch of players, and the joy from my point of view is that they are all willing to work hard and improve on their game.

"That as a coach and a manager is all you can ask from players."