Just one player fell off the Suspension Tightrope over the weekend’s nine fixtures. Sunderland’s Jack Rodwell was the guilty party, earning a fifth booking of the season for a foul on Pedro early in the second half of the Black Cats’ defeat at Chelsea.
Rodwell’s caution comes in just his fourth league start and with just 647 minutes under his belt this term, he has incurred the referee’s wrath every 130 minutes – in comparison, Jack Colback, who sits on seven yellows, has been booked every 157 minutes.
The midfielder will therefore miss a nostalgic trip back to the Etihad on Boxing Day before being back in contention in time for the Gameweek 19 home encounter with Liverpool.
Elsewhere, we saw a quartet of new arrivals to the Tightrope as the disciplinary halls were decked to excess in true festive fashion. Gary O’Neil and Jose Fonte were the early additions from Saturday’s 3pm kick offs – along with their respective team-mates Seb Bassong, Oriol Romeu and James Ward-Prowse, they will need to avoid another booking over the next two rounds of fixtures.
In yesterday’s late match, Aston Villa’s Ashley Westwood and goal scorer Jordan Ayew both collected a fourth caution of the campaign. This means there are now 15 clubs represented by at least one player who is a booking short of a single-match ban – they have to be on their best behaviour until New Year’s Day, when the threshold is extended to ten yellows.
Ahead of tomorrow evening’s clash between Arsenal and City, then, there are now 74 players still at risk of a one-match ban – 25 sit on the Tightrope, 41 require cards in both their remaining matches and a further eight from tomorrow’s Emirates encounter could yet succumb to suspension by earning three consecutive cautions. Essentially, then, every club still has players in danger.
In terms of further suspensions, West Brom duo James McClean and Salomon Rondon will sit out the next three Gameweeks after both were dismissed for violent conduct during Saturday’s 2-1 home loss to Bournemouth. The pair will therefore be missing the remainder of the festive programme against teams in the bottom half of the table, with a visit to Swansea on Boxing Day preceding back-to-back home clashes against Newcastle and Stoke.
Post-match, Tony Pulis was highly critical of both players, putting McClean’s challenge down to retaliation, before slamming Rondon’s altercation with the Cherries’ Dan Gosling:
“It was a reckless challenge from McClean. The disappointing thing for me was that 30 seconds before that, Smith went over the top of the ball and caught McClean on the ankle. McClean has not let that go and has gone after him with the next challenge, unfortunately, and you can’t condone that. If Mike Dean had given a free-kick for the first challenge then the sending-off would not have happened…It (Rondon’s behaviour) was crazy, absolutely stupid. Rondon can’t do things like that. We’ve never had any inkling that he’s had anything like that in him since he has joined us. That’s the first time we’ve seen him react like that.
Only one player returns from suspension this week, with Leicester’s Robert Huth available for selection again after he served a one-match ban in the 3-2 win at Everton. Bastian Schweinsteiger sits out the last of a three-match suspension this time out as United make their way to Stoke.
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