Stephen Evans

🚨 Jamie Carragher on Jayden Bogle’s challenge on Mathys Tel during Leeds against Tottenham: 🗣️ Jamie Carragher: “I watched that challenge on Tel, and I’m telling you, that was nasty. Really nasty. Tel has the ball, he knows Bogle is coming, and he tries to shift his body and move the ball away from him. Then Bogle catches him right on the Achilles, just above the boot. You can see Tel immediately knows something is wrong. He goes down in pain, he’s seriously injured and eventually has to leave the pitch. So I’m sitting there thinking, what exactly are the referee and VAR looking at? They replay it over ten times. They slow it down. They pause it. They show it from different angles. And somehow they still come to the conclusion, ‘You know what? There’s no foul.’ That is an absolute joke. I don’t care how many times you replay it. Look at the contact. Look at where Bogle catches him. Look at Tel’s reaction. You can see the pain on his face immediately. He’s trying to get away from the challenge and gets caught directly on the Achilles. Then he has to leave the pitch injured. And somehow we’re being told it isn’t serious enough? Seriously? What more do you need to see before you decide something is serious? The lad is injured and has gone off. He’s not pretending. He’s not rolling around trying to waste time. He tried to continue and couldn’t. Maybe we’re waiting until a player dies on the pitch before somebody finally says, ‘Actually, that was dangerous.’ Because apparently a player getting caught on the Achilles, going down in obvious pain and leaving the game injured still isn’t enough. That is where football has lost its way. The inconsistency is absolutely abnormal. One week, you see a similar challenge and everyone screams for a red card. The next week, a player gets caught like that and the officials basically shrug their shoulders. How does that make sense? And don’t tell me they didn’t see it. They replayed it again and again. They had every opportunity to look at the contact properly. They chose not to punish it. John Brooks and the VAR team looked at that and decided no serious foul had been committed. I find that incredible. Because if that isn’t serious, what exactly are we waiting for? Are we waiting for Tel to be carried off before we decide it was dangerous? Oh, wait — he already went off injured. So what more evidence do we need? Footballers have to be protected. You cannot allow challenges like that and then act surprised when players get seriously hurt. For me, that was a shocking decision. Not a borderline decision. Not a difficult one. A shocking one. And somebody needs to explain why a player can be caught on the Achilles, leave the pitch injured, and still have the officials decide there was nothing serious about it. Because if this is the standard now, we are asking players to accept dangerous challenges until somebody gets seriously hurt. And I don’t want to hear excuses afterwards. The officials had the footage. They had the time. They had the angles. They had everything they needed to make the right decision. They simply didn’t make it. And that is what makes it so frustrating.”