“I felt confident we could go on and win the game reasonably comfortably but going down to ten men so early made life a bit difficult,” he admitted.

“It’s funny - Newcastle dropped off after that. I was surprised to be honest, and our guys just got a new lease of life. They found legs I never knew they had. It was great.”

Now he hopes to take the gutsy but ugly victory as the start of winning run for the final games of the year.

“People have talked about season defining games,” said Kosmina. “This is not THE season defining game but we needed three points.

“We’ve gone six games undefeated which is great but we had three draws and two wins, now we are three and three. Now we need to go with it.

“Today is one of those games where you can take a lot out of it as a team and you gain that little bit more self-belief.

He added: “Adversity did bring out the best in us tonight and we need to remember it when we take on Perth next week because that won’t be an easy game either and we need to win that one too.

“It’s a psychological thing. You need to transfer that mentality into your training session then take it into the start of the game.

“We talked before the game about wanting it more than Newcastle and we did. It showed tonight that we wanted to win that game more than they did.

“Maybe we need to be angry with the opposition before the start of the match. Maybe we need to talk about something different before the game.”

He refused to get involved in either the red card dismissal for Ruben Zadkovich or the collision that appeared to knock out Joel Griffiths.

“From where I sat I thought he won the ball fairly cleanly,” he said. “I don’t know if he did or he didn’t but I’ll have a look at the tape. There’s not much more we can do about it.

“[The Griffiths incident] is just one of those strange things – maybe it was a Martian…who knows?”

He also paid tribute to Alex Brosque’s efforts upfield and said loan star Michael Bridges was simply replaced by Terry McFlynn to bolster their flagging midfield after Zadkovich’s sending off and not a reflection on the striker.

“Brosquey has done a great job upfront. He was dynamite.,” he said. “Our shape was a little bit different this week but I think it suits the players we had available.

“Bridges is getting into good areas. You’ve got to play yourself into some form. He’s only been in the country for six weeks and it’s a helluva culture shock.”