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Football London
Football London
Sport
Mark Wyatt

Alan Shearer and Gary Lineker agree on controversial Liverpool penalty decision v Crystal Palace

Both Gary Lineker and Alan Shearer have condemned Kevin Freind's decision to award Liverpool a penalty during their 3-1 win against Crystal Palace on Sunday.

The two pundits and former strikers both agreed that referee Kevin Friend got the incident wrong, which saw Reds forward Diogo Jota go down in the box after crashing into Palace keeper Vicente Guaita.

On first look, Friend saw nothing wrong with the challenge and left it unpunished, only for VAR to step in and recommend he check the pitchside monitors.

He then reversed his initial decision and awarded the penalty, despite the video replays suggesting that Jota had veered his body unnaturally into Guaita to engineer the foul.

Fabinho stepped up and fired the penalty into the net, with Eagles manager Patrick Vieira admitting the moment "killed the hope" from the game when speaking to reporters after the full-time whistle.

Shearer agreed with Vieira, and bemoaned the decision on Twitter, writing: "Joke decision VAR. Never a pen."

Speaking to Premier League Productions, he later added: "So Craig Pawson on VAR thinks that is a howler from Kevin Friend?

"He thinks that is such a clear and obvious error, I'm going to recommend you go to the screen and review your decision.

"Then, Kevin Friend hasn't got the courage to stand by his original decision and say 'you know what, I'm not going to listen to you, I'm going to stand by my original decision'."

Linker was just as shocked as his Match of the Day colleague, tweeting: "That Is Not A Penalty. Never in a million years." He added in a second tweet: "That is a genuinely appalling decision."

Speaking to the press after the game, Palace manager Vieira was visibly angered by the penalty decision, telling reporters: "I have looked at it in every single angle and I still don't understand how that can be a penalty.

"Contact is part of the game," he later added. "If there is a situation like that, if there is not a previous contact, then there will not be any kind of penalty.

"Jota was quite smart and the referee was quite naive and the VAR was really naive. There is no way Jota could get the ball back and try and score."

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