Newcastle defy Villa injustice after ‘one of the worst decisions’ Rooney has ‘ever seen in football’ | OneFootball

Dan Burn summed it up best.

“Look, he’s still f**king in there!” he pointed out to referee Chris Kavanagh with a level of Geordie incredulity it would have been incredible to hear rather than lip read.

But his message was patently clear: to award a free-kick against Lucas Digne, who almost mockingly remained on the scene of the crime to the extent he never left the penalty area when blocking Kieran Trippier’s cross, nor when protesting his innocence with a lazy wave of the hand which committed the infringement, was ludicrous.

It would have been so in any game. But in this particularly magical FA Cup tie it strengthened the sense that PGMOL had simply broadcast a simulation designed to show us a world in which VAR is put back into the bottle.

Tammy Abraham’s well-taken opener was nevertheless offside. Digne drew blood from Jacob Murphy with an ankle-high, studs-up tackle but only a yellow from the referee.

Marco Bizot was shown a red card, but only because failure to send off a keeper clearing out an attacker 40 yards from his own goal might have given the game away somewhat.

The Villa reserve keeper provided the perfect metaphor for an FA Cup weekend, coming crashing into the picture from out of nowhere, with Jacob Murphy a symbol of us all as he was knocked off course entirely.

When Emi Martinez is the sane shot-stopper in the squad, there is a problem. He was called on just before half time with Villa leading 1-0, yet was ultimately powerless as Newcastle rose above any sense of injustice to ultimately reach the last 16 comfortably.

“I’m starting to wonder, has officiating become lazy because of the fact that VAR is there?” Les Ferdinand pondered afterwards. “If they do miss a decision then usually VAR can correct it. We saw a few decisions today that perhaps, we know if VAR was available the decisions would’ve been different. I just wonder whether that’s causing the officials to miss decisions that they would usually get.”

There was a definite sense of a nervous, sat nav-reliant driver being asked only to use road signs, of someone incapable of independent thought having ChatGPT taken away.

It made a default stance of never wanting to write about the miserable subject of VAR, or avoiding criticising the performances of referees as the most unforgiving role in the sport, impossible. But really this sort of farce is inevitable when the safety net officials have had installed underneath them is suddenly removed, as is the case until the next round of the FA Cup.

The mistakes were so glaring that Eddie Howe left his normal seat on the fence to call the refereeing “strange”.

“I could see that one from where I was,” he quipped of the Digne handball before a Lampardian transition to praise how his players handled the emotion and situation.

“If you ever needed any evidence of the damage VAR has done to the referees, I think today is a great example of that, because these guys, I think, look petrified to make a decision today because they didn’t have a comfort blanket,” said Alan Shearer; fellow pundit Wayne Rooney called the Digne call “one of the worst decisions I’ve ever seen in football”.

Bizot’s rush of blood to the head which lasted almost half the length of the pitch pushed it close, but Burn and Newcastle’s disbelief at a decision from which they eventually scored anyway will define this curious tie.