Hindustan Times (Bathinda)

Who are the World Cup’s dirtiest players?

CARD HOLDERS Boys at the backline have resorted to foul play most often

- Shijith P Kunhitty shijith.kunhitty@htlive.com

NEW DELHI: These are the players we love to hate. The ones who deliberate­ly foul opposition forwards as they’re clear on goal. The ones who have no issues taking one for the team if it helps gain an advantage. These are also the ones who have the red mist descend on them and end up as liabilitie­s for their teams.

Every team has one or two of them. It might be argued that every team needs players like them as football isn’t all about skill and grace. It’s also about resorting to the dark arts if the situation demands it. To look at who are the dirtiest players at the World Cup, we looked at the players of the 32 teams and their disciplina­ry record in club football over the past four seasons.

Roughly, the period since the last World Cup in June-july 2014. (Though because of the way seasons in South America and Scandinavi­a are structured, the data might include a few months before the 2014 World Cup too. Data from Transferma­rkt.co.uk was used in this analysis.)

We tallied the number of yellow and red cards players have accumulate­d since the last World Cup while playing for their clubs.

The reasoning being that since World Cup players would have played more club football than national team football over the past four years, club football might give us a better idea of how prone these players are to getting yellow and red cards.

Looking at the players who have got the most yellow and red cards over the past four seasons, it might be no surprise to see who’s on top (see Chart 1). Sergio Ramos of Spain, who has been in the news for the injuries caused to the Liverpool players Mohamed Salah and Loris Karius in the Champions League final.

He has accumulate­d 63 yellow or red cards in 161 club matches for Real Madrid and his clubmate Dani Carvajal isn’t far behind. Carvajal has received a yellow or red card 58 times.

Third in the table is Enzo Perez, an Argentian defender. Almost all the players in top 10 are defenders or defensive midfielder­s for their clubs, but it is surprising to see a creative midfield player such as Ever Banega of Argentina in the top 10 list too.

The thing though about adding up cards like this is that it doesn’t take into account the amount of time various players would have played. So to give us a way of comparing the players fairly, we can take a look at the rate at which players get a card. So how long on average, has a player taken to get a yellow or red card? We tallied the number of minutes players played, divided them by the number of cards each player got and came up with a table (see Chart 2).

While making the table, we have excluded players who haven’t played at least 3,600 minutes over the past four club seasons. (Meaning, they would have had to play on average, at least 30 minutes in 30 matches for four seasons in a row.)

Two of the players are from Peru with Pedro Aquino and Wilder Cartagena getting cards every 162 minutes and 224 minutes respective­ly.

Surprising­ly, a forward, Ante Ribic of Croatia is third in the list getting a card every 179 minutes, or roughly, every other match.

Now what if we took yellow cards out of the equation? Meaning, we take only red cards into considerat­ion. Either straight red cards or red cards given out for a second yellow. This (see Chart 3) would give us an idea of who are the players who are most likely to get sent off and leave their team a man down, the players who are the biggest liabilitie­s.

Senegalese defender Saliou Ciss tops this list.

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