Chelsea have picked up two red cards in two games, and have an amazing 47 yellows already this season. It’s a problem, and Mauricio Pochettino has taken some pretty intense action to try and counter it.
Speaking in the embargoed part of his press conference, Pochettino revealed that he had been making his players watch back some of the cautions they’ve received this season, in a bid to cut down on this bad habit.
“We were talking about Nicolas Jackson, the yellow card because of complaining to the referee. The opponent made a foul and didn’t receive a yellow card. But you complain about ‘Why is that not a yellow card?’ And it’s ‘Oh, yellow card for you’. We receive it like this. We need to be clever and improve in this area. We cannot be silly to repeat, repeat, repeat the same mistakes,” Pochettino explained in quotes picked up by the Daily Telegraph.
This sounds like a positive move all around, and we’ve simply got to adjust to the realities of the very reasonable push from the footballing authorities to stop players haranguing referees.
We would hope that the players don’t need these things drilled into them like this, but they haven’t shown much progress, so we can see why Pochettino has been driven to these relatively unusual methods. Let’s hope that Conor Gallagher’s red last night was the last we see for a while.
