Gary Neville has warned that Tottenham will sacrifice points if they persist with their ‘reckless’ challenges, despite their 2-0 win at Nottingham Forest.
Yves Bissouma was given a straight red card for a thoughtless foul on Ryan Yates with Spurs 2-0 up and will miss the next three games as a result.
The midfielder was dismissed for the second time this season after a VAR check caught his boot scraping Yates’ shin as he wildly mistimed a challenge.
Spurs are now bottom of the Premier League‘s fair play table – with a disciplinary record more than twice as bad as Arsenal‘s – and Neville accused them of ‘madness’.
Yves Bissouma was sent off for this dangerous challenge on Nottingham Forest’s Ryan Yates
‘It’s a straight red, banned for three games, and absolutely, I’ve got no sympathy whatsoever. They don’t exist anymore [these challenges]. They were outlawed 10 or 15 years ago! They seem to have come back in in this last month or two.
‘They’re so talented, these players, [Cristian] Romero, [Destiny] Udogie, probably a couple more that I could name. They’re so talented and [it’s] so important to Spurs that they’re available and they’re fit and in the team.
‘For them to lose them constantly through all this… look, I got sent off two or three times in my career and made some mistakes. But these are getting sent off two or three times a season, some of these players, and it’s the same players.
‘They’ve got to stop it because they’re going to cost Tottenham. Spurs will drop points without these players.
‘If they’re injured, you can’t do anything about it. But if they’re continually being rash and reckless with these challenges, it becomes stupidity, it’s madness.
‘I bet he’s angry inside. I bet the Spurs fans are angry. I’m a little bit angry because I’ve not watched a team play football for a few years that have excited me as much as this team in terms of knowing that I’m going to get a good game of football.
‘They’ve got to stop those little bits of ill-discipline. I accept that it’s commitment but they just seem to do it regularly. They have got to stop it.’
