If he had spotted the infringement it would have led to a penalty to Manchester City and the dismissal of United right-back Rob Kozluk.

Replays showed Kozluk swatting a Micah Richards header off the line with his left hand, a situation Clattenburg was unaware of until the interval.

“I’m disappointed with the TV people because they told the referee about a penalty incident involving Kozluk,” complained Warnock.

“That shouldn’t have been allowed to happen in the tunnel.

“The referee then goes and tells Kozluk he’s lucky to get away with it. That’s so unprofessional. If I spoke like that to a referee I’d be done. It’s totally out of order and I’ll make my point.

“I think it’s unacceptable. I don’t think a referee should be mentally tried with statements like that at half-time. It can make him aware of a situation, and then going out for the second half he’s got to be thinking he’s made a cock-up.

“It’s put pressure on him. There were then one or two things in the second half that I felt should have gone our way which didn’t. What happened was totally out of order and I have said that to both the TV people and the referee.

“Unfortunately, the TV people forgot to mention a penalty we should have had too.”

If Clattenburg and his assistants had been observant they would have spotted two other clear cases of handball inside the area.

The first was against Richards as he used both hands to block a Claude Davis drive, while United captain Chris Morgan used his left arm in stopping a goal-bound effort from Darius Vassell.

“I was told by the referee at half-time he missed a handball, that one of their boys punched the ball off the line” said Pearce, referring to the Kozluk incident.

“As referees normally do, they give some and don’t give others. We leave it with them.

“You just hope that when decisions like that are missed, they even themselves out or they don’t have a bearing on the result.

“I don’t think they did in this game.”

Instead, it was Stephen Ireland’s first goal for the club on his 39th appearance that ended a run of three straight defeats.

City are now five points clear of the relegation zone on the back of Ireland’s 78th-minute strike, yet far from out of the woods as far as Pearce is concerned.

“This was a big result for us and although I was pleased with our resilience, I wasn’t with the performance,” added Pearce.

“I said before the game that given the position we are in we are going to have to scrap for 19 games to get results – now it‘s 18 games.

“There’s more ability in our dressing room than we are showing, but any illusions people had that we would gatecrash the European party, then those three defeats we suffered before this game have dispelled that.”