Fabrizio Romano is of course a “transfer guru”, but his behind the scenes sources provide him with plenty of information about other matters too.
When a story as juicy as Monday night’s penalty scandal at Stamford Bridge pops up, he’s all over it, and today in his exclusive column for Caught Offside he had a full run down of what was happening in the dressing room – at least according to him.
Romano claimed that things wouldn’t go any further than a major dressing down for those involved. Certainly a fine would seem unnecessarily disciplinarian, and would go against the friendly atmosphere Mauricio Pochettino likes to cultivate.
“We saw an extraordinary incident in Chelsea’s game against Everton on Monday night when a few of their players were arguing over who should take the penalty in the second half. Cole Palmer ended up taking it as usual, and scoring, and Mauricio Pochettino made it clear after the game that Palmer is his penalty taker,” Romano weote.
“Pochettino was clearly angry and said these kind of things cannot happen, but I’ve been asked by fans since then about any further action and I thought I would offer my understanding of the situation.
“I don’t think we’re going to see anything like Chelsea fining the players, it will just be about clarifying the issue internally face to face. This is what Pochettino wanted to do, discuss face to face and clarify between them. Chelsea don’t want to make it a bigger story than it really is.”
Pochettino’s fury
Romano is quite right to say that, having blown his top, Pochettino’s priority would now be to calm things down and basically move past this incident as quickly as possible. If we know him, he will even want to turn this into some sort of “learning experience” for him and the players. We’re sure that behind the scenes, he’s already been ruffling Noni Madueke’s hair.
It seems likely that Madueke is dropped for Saturday’s game, but punishment is unlikely to extend too far beyond that it seems to us.
We saw Pochettino lash out at the media after the post-game press conference on Monday, and he was clearly very angry about the whole situation. We hope his obvious fury leads to the whole situation being resolved immediately.
There’s sure to be plenty of attention on what happens when we earn our next spot kick, that’s for sure…
