Newcastle forward Anthony Gordon has forcefully denied accounts of his conduct around Newcastle’s midweek Champions League tie against Barcelona, calling the commentary surrounding his availability “absolute nonsense” and “complete and utter stupidity.” He specifically challenged comments made by Wayne Rooney on The Overlap.<\/p>\n
Rooney said: \u201cIf you\u2019re ill, you\u2019re ill. You shouldn\u2019t be there,\u201d and added, \u201cHe walked past us before the game and wouldn\u2019t shake our hands. He said he didn\u2019t want us to catch anything, but then he\u2019s going into the dressing room with his teammates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon dismissed that version of events while reflecting on a rare Premier League victory at Chelsea, where he scored the only goal on Saturday afternoon. Speaking on BBC’s Match of the Day, he said: \u201cI think Rooney said I went past and didn\u2019t shake their hands and went into the changing room. I didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got changed by myself in a changing room the size of this. It was just me and a sink. Complete nonsense. I think they need to do better at what they are doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordon went on to describe his illness and the timeline that followed. \u201cThe media guy told me what was being said was complete and utter stupidity,\u201d he said. \u201cI was in bed for three days, missed training, so sick for three days. Then I turned up on the day of the game, ready to start the game\u2014I thought I was starting. When I got to the stadium, the manager told me I wasn\u2019t playing, which, you can imagine, I didn\u2019t like very much, but that\u2019s his decision. And the team played great.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut saying I didn\u2019t want to play in the biggest game of my career is absolute nonsense.\u201d<\/p>\n
After Newcastle’s spirited draw with Barcelona, manager Eddie Howe made clear it was his choice to leave Gordon out and that the player had been \u201cabsolutely willing to play.\u201d Howe praised Gordon\u2019s \u201csingle-mindedness\u201d during the week, a trait the manager said returned on Saturday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Anthony Gordon rejects claims he avoided teammates while ill, calling reports complete nonsense. Ed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":8621,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[190,194,172],"tags":[506,1304,1047],"class_list":["post-8622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chelsea","category-newcastle-united","category-epl","tag-anthony-gordon","tag-benching","tag-champions-league"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8622"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8622\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/8621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}