Dai Young will take his Wasps squad to Newcastle on Friday © Getty Images

Enlarge

Wasps director of rugby Dai Young has called for an improvement on the road to cement their place in the top four of the Aviva Premiership.

Young's men head to lowly Newcastle Falcons on Friday night on the back of winning four of their last five league games.

By contrast, 11th-placed Newcastle have won just once in their last six games and were swept aside 46-17 at Exeter last weekend, but Young is taking nothing for granted at Kingston Park as he seeks to replicate Wasps' home form away from the Ricoh Arena.

"We need to take our home performances on the road," Young said. "We've had a couple of big away wins in the Aviva Premiership and the European Champions Cup, but we haven't been consistent in our away performances.

"If we want to achieve things this season, we have to match our away performances with our home performances."

Wasps breezed past Harlequins with a bonus-point win in Coventry last weekend to move into the Premiership's play-off positions and Matt Mullan again skippers the side in the absence of James Haskell, who remains with the England squad.

Welsh lock Bradley Davies and Italian centre Andrea Masi are both available, Ashley Johnson returns to the back-row following his three-week suspension for tackling an opponent in the air and wing Sailosi Tagicakibau and hooker Carlo Festuccia are also recalled.

"For us it's a massive game," Young said. "There are no easy games in the Aviva Premiership and winning away from home is always really difficult but, if you have ambitions to be in the top six, you have to beat teams which are down the bottom of the table.

"We need to win this match if we want to become one of the top teams."

Newcastle are safe from relegation with bottom club London Welsh winless and a distant 20 points below them and they are already looking to the future, the Falcons confirming the signing of New Zealander Mike Delany from Clermont Auvergne on Thursday.

Outside-half Delany has agreed a three-year contract from next season and Argentina centre Juan Pablo Socino believes the Kiwi will be joining a club moving in the right direction despite their struggles.

"The team has grown a lot since September," said Socino said, referring to Newcastle's 35-18 defeat at Wasps earlier in the season.

"We haven't got as many wins as we wanted to but I think performance wise we have grown a lot.

We are playing a lot better rugby, we are making smarter decisions and we run teams a lot closer. It's about time we start to get those wins on the backs of those performances."

Newcastle welcome back England prop Kieran Brookes and Italian lock Josh Furno from international duty, while full-back Alex Tait and wing Noah Cato also return.