It feels like a long time ago now, and we’ve had plenty of ups and downs since then, but if you cast your mind back to January, one of the main preoccupations at Chelsea was the insane number of very silly yellow cards the team were picking up.
It was illustrative of a wider immaturity in the team, but the stats were just jaw dropping, and the more it went on, the sillier the bookings seemed to get. It reached the point where Mauricio Pochettino was regularly having to address it in press conferences, and you could see how much it was frustrating him.
Back then he admitted he had taken to showing players compilations of their worst offences, and over time that has seemed to work. As Kieran Gill points out in the Daily Mail today, bookings for dissent peaked with an insane 7 in December and 3 in January. Since then, there have been just 3 in total in 3 and a half months. And by our reckoning, 2 of those 3 came in one incident when our players objected to Axel Disasi’s disallowed winner against Aston Villa.
An unwanted record shows a weakness
Unfortunately those early season misdemeanours have still put us on course for an unwanted record. The Blues are now on a total of 98 cards for the season, just 3 away from the all time record of 101 set by Leeds in 2021-2022. Given there are 3 games left to play and we average almost 3 a game, it looks very much like we will be the new holders of that record.
Still, as long as we maintain the improved discipline we’ve seen since the turn of the year, we shouldn’t be coming anywhere close to these numbers next year. Improved performances mean less frustration, and that means fewer bookings. So let’s hope that next season sees plenty of success, and less arguing with the ref.
