Blackburn Rovers manager Owen Coyle has said that his side's surprise victory over Newcastle United on Monday should serve as "a catalyst" for the rest of their season.

Charlie Mulgrew struck the only goal of the game to hand Rovers all three points and move them to just one point from safety.

The result represented just the third clean sheet for Coyle's side this season, and the Scot is adamant that they must now draw confidence going forwards.

"As I said to the lads afterwards, this has got to be the catalyst moving forward and not another false dawn as we did before when we beat Brentford, Newcastle and drew with Huddersfield," Coyle told reporters after the match. "We stood up to a wonderful team and picked up an excellent three points.

"We have been playing reasonably well, we've played a lot of games where we should have taken points, and with our injury problems that we've had, we've been chopping and changing.

"We didn't pass the ball as well as we would have liked [today] and didn't make the most of our counter-attacking opportunities so the message at half time was to make sure we took more care of the ball as we always believed that we could cause them problems. We accepted that they would always be a danger to our backline but then Charlie Mulgrew came up with a wonderful free kick."

Next up for Rovers is a trip to fellow Championship side Queens Park Rangers in the third round of the FA Cup on Saturday.