Shearer rages as referee and VAR steal the show as Newcastle beat Arsenal 1-0 at St James' Park

Newcastle United scraped a 1-0 win at home to Arsenal via a controversial Anthony Gordon goal.

Arsenal fans will be feeling like they have been fleeced tonight while Newcastle fans will be buzzing that despite VAR's determination, they couldn't find a reason to rule out Anthony Gordon's goal.

It was a game where the referee Stuart Atwell and his VAR team would have grabbed all the headlines were it not for Gordon's 64th-minute goal.

Kai Havertz could and indeed should have seen red in the first half

Arsenal's Kai Havertz was lucky to have been on the pitch after a shocking first-half challenge on Sean Longstaff which was ruled as wreckless rather than dangerous by VAR. In the wake of that poor decision, Atwell went card crazy and handed three yellow cards to Newcastle players for protesting.

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Bruno Guimaraes was also the beneficiary of shocking refereeing and VAR decisions as he gave a glancing elbow to the back of Jorginho's head when running past him. It was looked at by VAR but nothing was given. Bruno had lost his head by the end of the first half and was lucky to still be on the pitch. Bruno did get booked in the second-half, and Arsenal fans would be right to question how he managed to see out the 90 minutes.

Eddie Howe made a couple of changes, bringing Callum Wilson off and moving Anthony Gordon into the middle. About a minute later Anthony Gordon had the ball in the back of the net.

VAR took their sweet time in awarding Gordon's goal much to Shearer's disgust

VAR took four minutes to award it, however after checking whether the ball went out of play before it was crossed in, they looked to see if Joelinton had committed a foul in the build-up up and then they looked for Gordon being offside. VAR determined that they didn't have any decent angles to make a definitive call on any decision and the goal was awarded.

Alan Shearer was raging on X. During the Kai Havertz incident he posted "Well done ref. You're the man". Love the sarcasm, Alan. He later went on to call out the ridiculous amount of time it took to award the goal.

Newcastle managed to hang on to the lead and inflicted the first Premier League defeat of the season upon Arsenal.

We said it was going to be entertaining didn't we?