I’m the butt of a bad joke

Sky Sports pundit Jamie Carragher, who said: “Oh, get up! That is embarrassing. He should’ve just booked Rudiger.”

With referee Friend having dealt with the incident, there are unlikely to be any repercussions for either player.

But for Rudiger, even more frustrating was that Chelsea, even though they extended their unbeaten run to 12 league games since the start of the season, had failed to win, and slipped to four points behind league leaders City, who beat Manchester United 3-1. “I am frustrated. Of course we are still unbeaten, but to me it feels like we have dropped points. It seems like a loss,” he said.

“If you want to go for something important, you have to win these kind of games. We came out with a 0-0, so it was all for nothing.

“We didn’t get much from Everton up front. They had some counter-attacks, but I never had the feeling they would score.

“We have to improve our home form. We don’t need to speak about City or Liverpool. We need to speak about our own performances. We missed an opportunity. It’s like last season, when we dropped a lot of points, and at the end we were thinking, ‘if only’. We failed.

“I can’t be happy. I wanted to win, but we failed to do our job. If we don’t win these kind of games, we don’t need to look at City and Liverpool.”

EVERTON midfielder Gylfi Sigurdsson has withdrawn from Iceland’s Nations League clash against Belgium this week because of the ankle injury he sustained in a challenge from Jorginho on Sunday.