HERE’S hoping the statistics I picked up on this weekend were right, but I was more than a bit stunned to find out how few players were suspended ahead of this weekend’s Premier League round of games.
Going into this weekend’s games – including Monday’s meeting of Aston Villa and the reigning champions Manchester City – just two of the players from the squads of the 20 teams involved were suspended.
Now given that earlier in the season there were debates about whether referees were too card happy or if the game was becoming more violent, it would appear that here we are in March and so few misdemeanours have been committed that out of a the sum of the top flights squads only two men could not have featured in those ten matches.
Even on totting up on yellow cards you would have thought there would have been a few names kicking about, but the two men missing were West Brom’s Goran Popov and Reading’s Pavel Pogrebnyak – only one of them was for actual foul play.
The Royals’ Russian striker Pogrebnyak was serving the first game of his three-match suspension after being sent off in the 3-0 defeat by Wigan for a ‘horror’ challenge on Maynor Figueroa, while Macedonian Popov was serving the final game of a three-match ban for spitting at Tottenham’s Kyle Walker – very unpleasant but not ostensibly truly violent.
So, unless I need to stop buying my regular daily national paper as they are trying to paint a rosier picture of top flight football than the one that actually exists, I am going to take with a pinch of salt all those radio debates which involve former players getting all irate one minute about tackles that ‘could have ended a career’, only for the same people seconds later to declare that referees are making it a ‘non-contact sport’.
The stats would seem to suggest things are not too bad after all.
