STEVE McCLAREN retains the faith of his employers at Newcastle United, with Mike Ashley and Lee Charnley still convinced he is the right man to turn the club around despite Saturday’s 5-1 humiliation at Crystal Palace.

Newcastle slumped to their eighth league defeat of the season at Selhurst Park, crashing back into the bottom three in the process, and with the next two games pitting them against Liverpool and Tottenham, things could well get worse before they get better.

McClaren has endured a desperate 2015, with his combined record at Derby and Newcastle now standing at ten league victories from 36 matches, but Ashley and Charnley continue to regard him as their preferred figure to enact the long-term plan that was agreed when he was appointed in the summer.

That position could change if Newcastle are heading into the final third of the season at serious risk of relegation to the Championship, with Ashley mindful of the financial implications of missing out on next season’s lucrative new television deal.

However, there is no desire to change things ahead of the January transfer window, which is set to be a pivotal period in the season. Money had always been earmarked for the turn of the year, but there are likely to be some heated debates within the club’s recruitment committee about how it is spent.

McClaren will push for the addition of two or three domestic players with Premier League experience, and it is believed that Graham Carr is gradually coming to an acceptance that the current squad is far too callow and weak-willed for the position in which it finds itself. Whether Ashley will be willing to rip up his long-established transfer policy, however, remains to be seen.

Either way, there is little chance of a change of head coach prior to the turn of the year. David Moyes and Brendan Rodgers have both been mentioned as possible successors to McClaren, but senior sources suggest that neither figure is regarded as a better bet with the current group of players than the former England boss.

Might McClaren be tempted to walk away? Such a scenario can never be discounted, but the 54-year-old knew the scale of the task he was taking on when he agreed to succeed John Carver in the summer, and while he is privately understood to be furious at the attitude of some of his players, he remains convinced that the situation is salvageable.

“The key thing is that there’s no panic,” said McClaren, who cancelled his players’ planned day off yesterday and instead ordered them to report for an additional training session. “If there were seven or eight games to go, and we were still down there, then people would be panicking.

“But that’s where experience tells. We know we’re doing the right things every day. I know from experience, we’re doing the right things on the training ground, and in time, that will turn around and work. At the present moment it’s not, and that’s leading to huge disappointments, but I hope they will toughen us up and make us stronger in the long run.”

McClaren’s immediate priority is to instil some resilience and backbone into a group of players who repeatedly collapse at the first sign of adversity.

Having claimed the lead through a Papiss Cisse header at the weekend, Newcastle conceded two goals in the space of three minutes as their defence disintegrated, and went on to ship three more as Palace’s incisive counter-attacking play repeatedly ripped them apart.

“It’s not rocket science – everyone can see what’s happening,” said McClaren. “We get a setback, and we don’t react to it well enough. That’s what we need to turn around, and that has to come from the players and their own individual motivation.

“We stop doing our jobs when disappointment hits, and you can’t have that – you have to keep doing your jobs, and that’s what we have to keep forcing onto them.

“But I’ve still got faith in them. It makes it harder when you go through something like this, but you just hope that every bad game and bad result will make them stronger in the end.”

Saturday’s defeat came at the hands of a Palace side led by Alan Pardew, and the former Newcastle boss says it is crucial that everyone on Tyneside remains fully behind McClaren in the weeks and months ahead.

“I’ve been in Steve’s position, and it’s a tough role, but he’s tough enough to be able to deal with it,” said Pardew. “I think it’s important that the group stays strong now.

“I sometimes found myself (at Newcastle) in a position where you need everyone to pull for you, and that’s where they are now. Steve understands that as a manager, and all the staff and players really have to stick tight. They need to get the barriers up and get themselves a win, and I hope they win next week.”