Dan Burn has told Newcastle United’s stars to raise their game in Sunday’s clash against Nottingham Forest – or pay a painful price.

The influential Newcastle centre-back has no issues with recent form against Chelsea and Arsenal, but says that the Magpies must learn to find consistency against teams that aren’t traditional top six contenders and become more “ruthless”. United will square up to a Forest side who have been sitting in the top three all week with old boys Chris Wood and Elliot Anderson both ready and waiting at the City Ground.

And Burn knows that Newcastle’s approach must be exactly right as the Magpies look to avoid a day like Fulham earlier in the season. Burn told Chronicle Live ahead of the game: “It (beating Arsenal) gives us confidence. We always seem to be where we need to be.

“I never worry when we play Man City or Arsenal, it is easy to motivate yourselves for those games. It’s the games where you are up against “so-called lesser teams”. That is the challenge for us.

“You have that same level of motivation and that’s whether we play League Cup, FA Cup, any competition. Nottingham Forest are flying but it will be the same sort of thing we need to have that certain level if we are going there to get that result.”

Newcastle found themselves in the bottom half of the table after the final table from last weekend was calculated. Newcastle could climb back into the top half this weekend but also face the possibility of spending the November international break outside the top 10.

Nevertheless, Burn is not reading too much into the Premier League table, he said: “We are right in the middle of the table but everybody is quite close together at the minute. The pack haven’t spread out yet.

“Between after the international break in November to March, you will see teams start to build up runs. It has been quite hard to build up any type of momentum so far with all the international breaks. But yeah we are confident.

“We said at the start of the season we want European football and I think we are in a good position to do that. At the moment, we have got really good competition for places. We have Sven Botman coming back and Jamaal Lascelles will be back and so will Callum Wilson. We are in a strong position.”

Grappling with his old team-mates Wood and Anderson will be a tough assignment for Burn but he has no fears about the prospect of going in against two the most in-form players in the country. Reflecting on the reunion, he said: “I’m really, really happy for them. Woody first and foremost is a great person, he was a great team-mate when he was here so I think it’s great that he’s finally getting the recognition that he deserves.

“He got a hat-trick the last time so hopefully we will be better than that [day]. But you want to test yourselves against the best players in the league at the time and Woody’s on fire and is going to be hard to control so it’s a big challenge for us. Elliot, I’m really happy for him as well. The way he has performed at Forest when we played them [in the Carabao Cup] I thought he was brilliant, so really happy for him.”

Nevertheless, Burn says that the whole dressing room were left disappointed that a young player of Anderson’s calibre was allowed to leave last summer for non-football reasons.

The Blyth lad said: “That’s the rules so it was obviously disappointing from a team point of view to lose him. I don’t think anyone wanted to see him go and it’s obviously disappointing to lose another Geordie as well but I’m very happy for him.

“In hindsight, it’s probably helped him, we had a lot of competition in the position that he wanted to play and he’s been able to have more game time at Forest and I think he’s proven why he’s been such a good player.”

The last week has resulted in more than one suggestion from inside St James’ Park that simply qualifying for a European competition is the aim of the season. There were some suggestions of Champions League football from CEO Darren Eales and sporting director Paul Mitchell but regardless of aims from within, Burn says that the team are fired up to simply get back into Europe after last season’s agonisingly close miss.

The former Brighton star told me: “Yeah, I think so, to finish in the position we did last season with the year we had with injuries. I never like using it as an excuse but it was always tough to bounce back from. We were proud of that and I think it gave us that platform to build on.”