Chelsea have squeaked to a pretty fortunate 2-1 win over Bournemouth tonight, and the game at the Vitality Stadium, won by a late Christopher Nkunku goal.
The game won’t live long in the memory – but it did break a Premier League record for the number of cards shown in a game – all of them yellow.
In the end, 14 cards were shown by Anthony Taylor, who was abused by Chelsea fans from before the game had kicked off, and responded by booking as many of their team’s players as possible.
He then seemed to start handing out soft yellows to the home team too, almost as if to balance things out. That, combined with some incredibly petty and silly actions from players on both sides, led to a constant stream of cards thrown around by Taylor, who seemed to have been told to be as strict as possible on tackles, dissent, and, well, everything.
Here is the full list of bookings by the way, in order.:
Ryan Christie (18 minutes), Wesley Fofana (31 minutes), Lewis Cook (35 minutes), Marc Cucurella (36 minutes), Robert Sanchez (37 minutes), Adam Smith (38 minutes), Nicolas Jackson (52 minutes), Levi Colwill (57 minutes), Jadon Sancho (57 minutes), Justin Kluivert (60), Marco Senesi (80 minutes), Renato Veiga (87 minutes), Joao Felix (91 minutes), Antoine Semenyo (95 minutes).
Chelsea need their focus when not playing well
People will look back on this game as the record holder and imagine it was violent and thuggish – in fact it was niggly and scrappy. Violence wasn’t on the cards – one of the yellows was for a tackle where Levi Colwill clearly won the ball, but was punished anyway.
We saw far too much of this last season, where players like Nicolas Jackson ended up getting far too many soft cautions through the course of the season. Mauricio Pochettino wasn’t able to stamp it out – Enzo Maresca must do better – although tonight he will just be happy to have 3 points.
Anthony Taylor showed (once again) he hasn’t a clue how to manage a Premier League match. If there is any standard of review for head officials then surely he should be receiving some fairly harsh feedback. He came just a whisker away from destroying what was a relatively clean (if scrappy) match. Had either side gone down to ten men for a second YC it would have been a true travesty.
Anthony Taylor es un verdadero Hijo D Pta, hasta cuando tendrá impunidad es un descarado sinvergüenza.