🎶🎶 … Kai Havertz gets booked again …🎶🎶

It’s a damp Interlull Wednesday in March, the blogging equivalent of a cold rainy Tuesday night in Stoke. Let’s see what we can come up with.

Let’s start with Kai Havertz, and the story that he should have been given a second yellow card against Brentford for a ‘clear act of simulation’. This is what the Key Match Incidents panel have decided anyway, a group made up of former players and coaches, and a representative of both the PGMOL and the Premier League.

So, to be clear: on the night none of the on-field officials thought it was worthy of a second yellow, and after the game none of the old refs they bring out on Sky Sports etc thought it was a second yellow either. VAR, of course, couldn’t intervene on the night as they are not allowed review yellow cards.

Here’s what I wrote at the time: “Was it a penalty on Havertz? No. Was it a second yellow card? Absolutely not. You can’t send a player off for that. There was some contact that he made the most of, but that’s it. Frank’s post-game garbage also conveniently ignores the penalty Trossard should have had, and the one Gabriel ought to have had right at the end. If the Brazilian was booked for a shirt pull early in the first half, what’s the difference between that foul and the one committed on him in the box? Exactly.”

I’m not going to circle the conspiracy drain here, but this kind of thing feels like a soft target decision that really does nothing to benefit anybody. Why was there no review of the Trossard incident which, to me, is 100% a penalty? Why, if we want to look at this through a Brentford lens, was there no review of the incident in their last game against Burnley when David Datro Fofana basically rugby tackled Mathias Jorgensen in the box and got away with it? For me that’s unquestionably a penalty for Brentford, and far more obvious a ‘foul’ than Havertz purported dive.

I could be wrong, but that one was a can of worms decision, because once you start giving…

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Author : arseblog

Publish date : 2024-03-20 07:45:21

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