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Alan Shearer has berated the officials after they failed to award an obvious penalty to Newcastle in their FA Cup fourth-round tie against Aston Villa. Newcastle beat 10-man Villa 3-1 on Saturday night to book a place in the fifth round, but the post-match discussion was dominated by a different topic.

The Magpies took the lead in the 63rd minute through the first of two Sandro Tonali strikes at Villa Park, but only after they should have been awarded a spot-kick. Villa left-back Lucas Digne clearly handled the ball inside the area when trying to close down a cross, yet referee Chris Kavanagh inexplicably awarded a free-kick on the edge of the box.

The video assistant referee only comes into the FA Cup from the fifth round onwards, meaning that Kavanagh's error could not be amended. Newcastle ended up scoring from the second phase of the resulting free-kick and they went on to win comfortably - aided by Marco Bizot's red card - but club legend Shearer was still fuming in the BBC studio.

"There is perhaps a small excuse for the referee to not see this - and I'm being kind to him. But there is no excuse whatsoever for the assistant Nick Greenhalgh, who is 10 or 15 yards away and has had an absolute nightmare today," he began.

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"He cost for the offside free-kick (Tammy Abraham's opening goal for Villa) and he's 15 yards away from that. Goodness me! If you ever needed any evidence of the damage VAR has done to the referees, I think today is a great example of that, because these guys, I think, look petrified to make a decision today because they didn't have a comfort blanket.

"And that's the damage it's done to the officials. For me, they're actually getting worse because I really don't think that is a difficult decision at all, in fact it's easy and at this standard, that has to be given. There's no excuse for the assistant not to tell his referee that he's got that totally wrong."

Wayne Rooney then suggested that it was Greenhalgh who was most a fault because he didn't overrule Kavanagh, despite having a better view of the handball.

"I think you can be critical of officials, or you can praise them either way. But that decision is one of the worst decisions I've ever seen in football, because at no stage was Digne out of the penalty box," he said.

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"I think he's three or four yards inside the penalty box, and the linesman was just in front of us and you can clearly see how much he is inside the penalty box. To not give that decision... The referee blew and he looked like he was talking to someone in his ear, I'm assuming the linesman has given that decision and it's an absolute shocker."

Ex-Villa striker Dion Dublin then added: "For Digne to jump into the ball and still be inside the box when he's jumping is just... I don't know. He'll be embarrassed when he sees that and all the officials know that they've made a blunder. It won't matter now, because Newcastle got the result, but that's poor."

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