Touch an opponent above the neck and you're in red card territory. Push them in the chest and it's yellow at worst. Hasn't that always been the case?
I think Vertonghen got lucky not to see yellow when he pushed Torres. It wasn't a general push in the passage of play either, it was an off the ball incident and in retaliation - in the rule book that is called unsporting behaviour and is punishable by a yellow card. A couple of minutes later he did get booked for scything down Torres and could quite easily have seen a second yellow and a red there and then. He was actually pretty fortunate to be on the pitch by the time he simulated a head injury resulting in Torres' second yellow.
The bottom line is Torres would never have been sent off if the game were at Stamford Bridge and Vertonghen probably would have. We could sit here and lambast opposition players all day but it won't change anything. Normally I'd have sympathy for referees as players are constantly making their lives difficult but what we saw on Saturday was weak refereeing and officiating. If Dean saw the scratch then Torres should have been red carded. If Dean didn't see the scratch then both players should have received the same treatment I.e Yellow Card/Nothing. For the actual red card, two players went head-to-head for a ball that was 50/50, what Dean did was simply guess and cave into the crowd and give the home side the decision. Clattenburg has been guilty of showing the same kind of favouritism to United down the years.
The bigger issue is the Townsend dive which seems to have gone completely unnoticed. Not to mention the persistent fouling on Hazard and Oscar throughout the match, much of which went unpunished.
On the last point - Vertonghen headed the ball well before Torres clattered into him. While I thought it was a foul by Torres and not a yellow card it was perfectly possible for the ref to see it differently. No evidence of bias in my view. I thought he had a generally reasonable match and his few mistakes were roughly evenly distributed.
The commentators seemed to think that the yellow card was for the foul prior to the push/scratch incident which the ref treated as 'handbags' and rightly so if he didn't see the scratch.
Really? The rule book has 13 different definitions of Unsporting Behaviour and this isn't one of them!
Chelsea fans will call Vertonghen a cheat and diver, Spurs fans will call Torres nasty and spiteful. As I said before, the bigger picture is being missed. The second half of the game was poorly refereed by a ref that couldn't handle the game. Referees and officials will always make mistakes but guessing is unforgivable.
I agree with that. But we are all guessing as to what Torres got the second yellow for. The Ref spoke to him on a number of occasions. He may have got it for persistent infringement if he thought the last challenge was a foul.
This bias is quite remarkable. They both went up for a 50/50, that's it, nobody did anything wrong, yet Dean chose to send Torres off because like DL rightly said, he gave into crowd pressure. Ignore the bollocks that happened prior to the 2nd yellow, it's irrelevant.
It was nowhere near a 50:50, Vertonghen got to the ball well first. It was perfectly reasonable to be given as a foul but I don't think it fell into the category of a yellow card except possibly for persistent infringement.
This is quite a good summary of the whole affair http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/fo...disgrace-Chelsea-v-Tottenham-GRAHAM-POLL.html
