'What's wrong with Newcastle?': Chelsea and France legend was 'worried' about Newcastle United on Sunday

Newcastle United beat Chelsea 2-0 at St James' Park on Sunday, setting themselves up nicely in the race for the Champions League with one more win enough to secure Newcastle's place in Europe's elite competition.

As we've said a few times, Sunday's win against Chelsea was nowhere near as comfortable as the 2-0 scoreline would suggest.

In fact, given that Chelsea had a man sent off 35 minutes into the first half, you'd have expected Newcastle to go and build upon the one-goal lead they'd been sitting on since the second minute.

However, in the second half, you'd have been forgiven for thinking it was Chelsea who had the one-man advantage with Newcastle taking until the 90th minute to put the game to bed.

Frank Leboeuf says Newcastle didn't deserve to win on Sunday

In fact, Newcastle were so poor for large parts of that second half that former Chelsea man and World Cup winner with France, Frank Leboeuf said that Newcastle didn't deserve to win on ESPN.

“Chelsea, even 10vs11 [players] were better than Newcastle.

“I was worried. I said ‘what’s wrong with Newcastle?’ Physically, they went down, they couldn’t react, and I think overall, they didn’t deserve to win.”

Newcastle deserved the win simply for surviving the Chelsea barrage of poor tackles

Newcastle may have dominated more if Chelsea weren't kicking seven bells out of us and if the referee had shown Moises Caicedo a card on one of the many occasions he should have. That may have calmed him down slightly.

To say we didn't deserve to win seems a bit far-fetched. We didn't make it look easy, there's no doubt about that, but on balance, we deserved the victory as Nicolas Jackson's forearm smash wasn't the only bit of dirty tactics employed by the Blues.

We'd have been absolutely livid if we'd blown that lead and come away with a draw if we're being honest, even as poor as we were in the second half.