PREMIER LEAGUE players that were one booking away on New years eve from suspension were happy to see 2017 roll in.
It will now take 10 bookings for a player to receive a match ban before April 2, so those with just one booking remaining before having to miss a match now have six more chances!
If a player was to receive 20 cautions in the season then they would be hauled before a regulatory commission in what would be a very unusual case.
Silly bookings are what really annoy managers, such as time wasting, kicking the ball away and taking off shirts when a players has scored.
Now these things should not matter to much but come the business end of the season at both ends of the table, Premier League bosses will be instructing their players to keep their heads and keep themselves out of the officials notebook.
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There have been other rule changes this season, most notably the kick off, where the ball no longer has to go forward, so kick off only requires one player to pass the ball back to their team mates.
Another card rule change has allowed referees to give players red cards before the match kicks off, this applies to incidents in the warm-ups, or if the two teams line up in the tunnel and something kicks off resulting in an issue of violent conduct.
A famous pre-match tunnel bust up in 2005 at Highbury caught on camera between captain’s Patrick Vieira of Arsenal and Manchester United‘s Roy Keane.
How different the game would have been if both skippers were sent off before the game even started, it will be interesting to see if any incidents like that ever happen again with the new rule.
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