Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca pressed referees on consistency after Mois\u00e9s Caicedo was sent off in the draw with Arsenal. Maresca accepted the red card but questioned why a similar challenge from Tottenham\u2019s Rodrigo Bentancur on Reece James one month earlier was not given the same sanction, despite VAR involvement in that incident during a 1\u20130 victory.<\/p>\n
\u201cI just said there, he asked me about Mois\u00e9s\u2019s red card. It\u2019s a red card, but why was Bentancur\u2019s against Reece not a red card when we were at Spurs away?\u201d Maresca argued. \u201cSo us, as a manager, we struggle to understand why they judge in a different way.<\/p>\n
\u201cMois\u00e9s\u2019s is a red card, yes. Bentancur\u2019s is a red card, yes. Why don\u2019t they give him a red card? It\u2019s just that we struggle to understand. The reality is that it\u2019s a red card. But why do they judge it differently?\u201d<\/p>\n
Chelsea were also unhappy with referee Anthony Taylor\u2019s decision early in the second half when Arsenal defender Piero Hincapi\u00e9, already on a yellow card, struck Trevoh Chalobah in the face. The contact left Chalobah with a black eye and visible swelling, but Hincapi\u00e9 was not dismissed.<\/p>\n
\u201cI asked the referee, he said to me that it was not an elbow,\u201d Maresca revealed. \u201cSo, this is what they said.<\/p>\n
\u201c[Chalobah had a] black eye, with ice at half-time. But they judge in different way.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite playing with 10 men for around 60 minutes, Chelsea remained competitive. Chalobah opened the scoring before a Merino header levelled the match. Maresca\u2019s side registered more shots on goal and were described as just as likely to find a winner as their opponents.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m proud,\u201d James told club media . \u201cThe team is so young, but we went toe-to-toe with the team at the top of the Premier League at the moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe didn\u2019t show fear and we tried to come out to win the game. Unfortunately we weren\u2019t able to do that, but there were a lot of positives to take from the game. We knew the game was going to be tough, but to be honest it was a game we felt we probably could have won. It was difficult to only walk away with a point considering how well we did.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe played 60 minutes with 10 men, having to cope with all of their players\u2014they are a very good team, they\u2019re the league leaders at the moment. We went toe-to-toe with them, so we have lots of good things to take away.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe started sharp, we had a few early half-chances, but the game got more difficult when we went down to 10. We made a few changes and they were coming forward a lot, but we still felt we had the players and the quality to hurt them when we got the ball. We tried our best, now we have to take a point and move forward.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Maresca criticised refereeing consistency after Caicedo’s red card and a separate Hincapi\u00e9 incident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4802,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[192,190,172],"tags":[1140,1089,1215],"class_list":["post-4803","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arsenal","category-chelsea","category-epl","tag-caicedo","tag-chelsea-struggles","tag-controversy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4803","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4803"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4803\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.weplayfpl.com\/news-articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}