Eddie Howe cut a slightly frustrated figure with his post-match comments for Newcastle’s 4-2 defeat at Anfield.
The ex-Bournemouth coach felt aggrieved at some of the decisions that went against his side, including the alleged failure to award Sean Longstaff a penalty.
Neil Mellor analysed the incident on LFCTV, however, and noted that the Magpies star in question interestingly didn’t opt to appeal for a spot-kick.
“Was it a penalty? Well here we go, Newcastle wanted a penalty, Eddie Howe was saying it’s a penalty,” the former Red spoke on LFCTV’s Review Show.
“This is the only angle we can show you, I’m not sure if that’s handball, really difficult to see but it looks like it’s going to be close to a handball. We can’t give you a better angle. It might have been a handball in the build-up.
“Endo’s challenging Longstaff here. We’ll move it on. There is contact but the contact is Longstaff going down and leaving his trailing foot and there’s a little contact from Endo.
“For me, I think that would have been a harsh decision for the penalty – but like we said [Longstaff] didn’t appeal.
“If someone’s fouled me, I’m appealing for a penalty, without a doubt. So that tells it’s own story that the player was saying: probably not enough in it for a penalty.”
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It says a great deal when you have Newcastle United fans on social media admitting they were fortunate to keep the scoreline vaguely close.
With us utterly dominant throughout and the visitors seriously outperforming their xG (whilst we underperformed against ours), most will have surely left L4 feeling a little relieved we didn’t take them to the cleaners.
Ultimately, if Longstaff didn’t believe he had a case to put forward for a penalty – not too dissimilar to Martin Dubravka’s contradiction – we’re at a loss to explain why Howe does.
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