First, Moises Caicedo dives into a horror tackle on Mikel Merino. No complaints there that’s a red all day long. Even Maresca admitted it. But his real anger was about the double standards.
He went straight back to Bentancur’s tackle on Reece James at Spurs earlier this month and basically said: if Caicedo’s is red, how on earth was that one not? And then came the Hincapie moment.
Trevoh Chalobah scores, puts Chelsea 1-0 up, then later ends up with a black eye after an aerial clash with Piero Hincapie. Reece James is screaming for a red, Chelsea players are livid, and Maresca asks the ref about it. The answer? “It was not an elbow.” Chalobah is literally on ice at half-time.
This is exactly the kind of grey area that keeps managers awake at night, and if you’ve lived through all the recent sagas around cards and flashpoints the kind of drama you see in pieces like Slap, Red, Redemption this felt like another wild chapter in the same story.
Arsenal, though, will know they let Chelsea off the hook. With Gabriel and Saliba both missing, going down to 10 men should’ve killed Chelsea.
Merino equalised and admitted he was lucky not to have his ankle wrecked by Caicedo’s tackle, but after that, Arsenal never really turned the screw.
Instead, Arteta’s men got dragged into the street fight. He even said his players were being “targeted” for cards as Chelsea tried to level things up in numbers, if not on the scoreboard.
In the end, it finished 1-1, but it felt like so much more: a black eye, a red card, a furious manager, and a title-chasing Arsenal side that blinked when it mattered.
Matches like this are why we love this game not just for the goals, but for the chaos, the controversy, and the feeling that anything can explode at any moment.
