THREE years, three successive appearances in the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup. They might not have ended their wait for silverware yet, but Newcastle United have nevertheless created a bit of club history in the last three seasons.

For the first time ever, the Magpies have made the last eight of the League Cup for three years in a row, with last night’s 2-0 win over Chelsea booking their latest quarter-final spot and setting up a home meeting with Brentford in the week before Christmas.

Ultimately, reaching a quarter-final counts for little if you fail to lift a trophy, or at least make it to Wembley, but Eddie Howe nevertheless takes a degree of pride from his team’s League Cup exploits in the last few years.

“I think it does say something,” said the Newcastle boss. “The early rounds in any cup competition are very difficult, as we found to our cost against Cambridge and Sheffield Wednesday.

“Your attitude is the most important thing – in the early rounds, it has to be spot on or you’ll be eliminated, so I think we’ve navigated those pretty well.

“Then, later in the competition, when you come up against teams like Chelsea, you have to have the players with the ability to win games like that. The more games of this calibre we can win, then these are the acid tests for where we want to be.

“We narrowly missed out against Chelsea last year, trying to get to a semi-final, and that was agonising for us. Fingers crossed we can go a step further this year.”

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Last night’s win not only secured Newcastle a place in the quarter-finals, it also ended a three-match winless run and extracted at least a degree of revenge for last weekend’s Premier League defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge.

You could see the confidence returning to Newcastle’s players as they pinned their opponents back in the first half, scoring two goals in the space of four minutes, and while their opponents might have made a host of changes, Howe still feels the victory was extremely important in terms of boosting morale ahead of Saturday’s home game with an in-form Arsenal.

“Confidence is always a fragile thing in all sorts of ways,” said the Magpies boss. “You can talk about it and do lots of different things, but I think the only thing that really gives you it is winning football matches.

“The biggest thing in football is confidence, in my opinion, so I think that (the Chelsea win) was a really important moment for us.

“We looked like we had goals in us – we scored two and could have scored more. Yes, Nick (Pope) made some good saves at the end and we had to defend well, but you’re always going to need to against any Premier League team.

“It goes without saying you’ll have work to do defensively, and there are areas to improve, but just generally, we’ll feel much better about ourselves.”