GARY O’Neil described the decision to award Brentford a penalty as “scandalous”, adding how he felt it “strange” that Jarred Gillett was chosen to referee the fixture.

Gillett awarded a spot-kick to the hosts when Toney went over under Marcos Senesi’s challenge towards the end of the first half. Video assistant referee Andre Marriner did not intervene.

Toney stepped up himself, slotting past goalkeeper Neto to put Brentford in front.

A late goals from Mathias Jensen secured a 2-0 win for the hosts, leaving Cherries having lost six in a row in all competitions.

It was the first Cherries match Aussie Gillett had taken charge of since the play-off semi-final second leg between these two clubs in May 2021, where he sent off Chris Mepham having already awarded a controversial penalty for a handball by Lloyd Kelly. Brentford went on to win 3-1 on the day to progress to the final.

“Ivan Toney has managed to lock Marcos’s arm underneath his and just drags him,” O’Neil told the Daily Echo, discussing today’s penalty decision.

“How we are in a day and age with VAR and we still get that wrong I think is scandalous.

“I’ve spoken to the referee. I told him that I expect an apology, even though that doesn’t help me.

“I think when you get something that wrong, when it’s that important.

“Obviously he has some history as well from when we were last here in the play-off semi-final. I thought he was equally as bad this evening as he was then.”

Asked what he has been told about the decision, O’Neil added: “I’ll be able to catch up with him shortly. Obviously you have to leave it a little while after the game before you have a detailed chat. So I’ll try and get exactly what went on.

“Because when I watched it, I thought they are definitely overturning that. They’re definitely giving us a foul. And then you hear the usual noise that you hear at the moment when you’re a Bournemouth fan and there’s a VAR check. They are going to upstand the decision and they are going to give a penalty against you.

“But if we focus purely on today’s one and forget the ones in the past, I thought it was a terrible decision.”

Asked if he was concerned pre-match about the decision to select Gillett as referee for this particular contest, O’Neil said: “I thought it was a strange game to give him, given the last one.

“But I also thought that he’d cope with it fine. And he should get some help from VAR as well.

“Live, I can understand why you would think that obviously there’s a coming together and you can see that Ivan Toney has gone over.

“Anyone can make a mistake at that moment. But then how we don’t reach the right conclusion with what we have available to us now is scandalous.”