Graeme Souness names 3 offences where blue cards & sin bins will work in the PL
Graeme Souness has gone against the grain by saying that the introduction of blue cards can work in the Premier League, if used correctly.
The idea of adding blue cards to yellow and red cards has proven extremely unpopular since the news leaked on Thursday. Managers, players, fans and pundits have all dismissed it as unnecessary and over complicated.
The International Football Association Board (IFAB) believes that introducing blue cards to punish things like dissent and cynical fouls would make a difference. Players would be sent to the sidelines for 10 minutes, with blue cards providing a deterrent stronger than a yellow, but less severe than a red.
Liverpool boss Jurgen Klopp and Newcastle manager Eddie Howe have been among those to push back against the idea – and IFAB have now delayed their announcement due to the strength of the backlash. But former Liverpool player Souness thinks they do have a place in the game, provided they’re only used in certain instances.
He has made his case in the Daily Mail, where he writes that blue cards could be the answer to stopping diving altogether. “If a player is guilty of this, off you go,” he wrote. “Go and sit on the touchline for 10 minutes and nurse that serious injury you don’t have. Overnight, this would remove such simulation. I guarantee, the first weekend it was introduced, players would stop doing it. Right away, that makes for a better game.”
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Souness also feels that blue cards would be useful for other offences, which currently don’t fit into the categories for yellow or red cards. He believes that players who brandish imaginary cards in an attempt to get others booked and those who are aggressive towards the referee should be sin binned for 10 minutes.
He concluded: “If the Premier League, the most-watched league in the world, can set a better example and get its house in order in this respect, you would hope it would filter down to the Sunday leagues, where some of the outrageous behaviour has included physical assaults on officials.”
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His view is different to that of Klopp, who spoke at length about the idea in his press conference on Friday. He said: “I think everything that the actual situation shows is we should keep it as simple as possible for the referees.
“It’s a difficult job, often quite emotional when we speak about it more so because it’s after the game, and I think the introduction of a blue card would just give more opportunities to fail as well because the discussion will be: ‘It was a blue card, should it have been a yellow card, now it’s 10 minutes off, in the good old times it would have been a red card or only a yellow’. These kind of things just make it more complicated. If they want to test it I have no problem with testing if that’s the first step to agreeing or it.”
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