Report: Last night's VAR and AVAR have been stood down by UEFA after howler that could cost Newcastle millions

Newcastle United's Champions League fate is no longer in their own hands after a controversial equaliser from PSG last night.

Eddie Howe's Magpies looked set to come away from Paris with a hard-fought 1-0 win until referee Szymon Marciniak was called to the VAR monitor to check a potential handball by VAR Tomasz Kwiatkowski and AVAR Ivan Bebek. Marciniak overturned his original decision and awarded the penalty despite TV replays clearly showing that the ball hit Tino Livramento's chest before his arm.

There are rumours that the VAR only showed one angle of the incident to the referee which would have made it impossible for him to make the right call, but we can't verify those claims.

UEFA has admitted guilt without admitting guilt

ESPN is reporting that UEFA has now stood down Tomasz Kwiatkowski and Ivan Bebek who were both due to be on VAR duty in tonight's round of fixtures.

Bertrand Guay via AFP

Without releasing a statement, UEFA has made one by binning off the people responsible for the poor decision which is about as good of an admission of guilt as we're likely to get, unless a statement is due out later today.

The decision to award the penalty, which was duly despatched by Kylian Mbappe now means that instead of going into the final game with our destiny in our own hands, we're now relying on Borussia Dortmund to get at least a draw against PSG as well as us needing a win against AC Milan.

Newcastle could be out of pocket by millions thanks to this error

If Newcastle now go on to beat AC Milan but still lose out on qualification, that penalty decision will have cost Newcastle millions in revenue.

The irony, and perhaps the biggest sickener is, we'd all have taken a draw before the game, and if PSG had scored from open play, we'd have had no real complaints about that either. Obviously, we'd have been gutted, but we wouldn't all be sat here with that huge sense of injustice weighing down on us.

The good thing is, we're more than capable of beating AC Milan and Dortmund, if they want to, can batter PSG, so there's still a very real chance we qualify, and if not we'll probably end up in the Europa League, so we'll just go on and win that instead.