Gary Neville believes Tottenham Hotspur defender Emerson Royal should not have held Levi Colwill back in an incident in the first half of Monday night’s Premier League encounter between the two.
Spurs fell to a 4-1 defeat at the hands of the Blues, but the scoreline barely tells the story of one of the most dramatic Premier League games in recent history.
A total of five potential goals were ruled out for either offside or handball, with VAR having to check a host of decisions.
Two Tottenham players were also sent off, while two others had to come off injured, and Chelsea’s Nicolas Jackson ended up sealing his hat-trick with two injury-time goals.
Had things gone slightly differently, Spurs’ opponents could’ve potentially gone down to ten men by the interval too.
Deep in first-half injury time, Nicolas Jackson went into the book for pulling down Pape Matar Sarr. Colwill then started pushing and shoving the Spurs man.
Emerson held the 20-year-old Chelsea man back, stopping him from potentially going at Sarr.
“Colwill has snapped,” Neville said live during the match, as per the Sky Sports website.
“Royal has saved him by pushing him away. The Spurs players should have let him go.”
Chelsea made the most of it as Mauricio Pochettino took Colwill off at half time.
And while the Blues finished the game with 11 men, Spurs ended up getting another player sent off to go down to nine.
Tottenham had opened the scoring early on through Dejan Kulusevski’s effort that deflected off Colwill.
However, Cole Palmer equalised from the penalty spot on 35 minutes after Romero’s red card for fouling Enzo Fernandez.
Although Tottenham tried to hang on after going down to nine, Chelsea ended up breaking their resistance in the 75th minute.
Sterling timed his run to receive Reece James’ pass before squaring the ball for Nicolas Jackson to tap in.
Jackson went on to score twice more in second-half injury time to add gloss to the scoreline.
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Letting Colwill potentially lash out at Sarr could well have been the logical decision with regards to potentially getting Chelsea down to ten.
However, the first thing going through Emerson’s mind was probably that of defending his teammate and trying to cool things down with Colwill. Instinct, basically.
It’s not like it was a critical decision as far as Tottenham were concerned. And certainly not potentially at the expense of Sarr getting hit.