Newcastle United star avoids Premier League ban amid Bruno Guimaraes worry

Newcastle United winger Anthony Gordon has successfully avoided a two-match Premier League ban, however, one of his teammates is still walking a disciplinary tightrope. Gordon has been shown eight yellow cards so far this season in the Premier League and avoided a ninth booking against Fulham on Saturday.

That means that he can no longer pick up ten yellow cards before they have played 32 games of the season. That cut off point comes this weekend against Tottenham Hotspur, meaning Gordon cannot reach the yellow card threshold.

However, Bruno Guimaraes remains just one booking away from picking up ten in the league this season and so has just one final 90 minutes to avoid that outcome. The Brazilian has gone ten league games in a row without being shown a booking with his last yellow card coming against Manchester City back in January.

Previous to that, Guimaraes had picked up a booking in four-straight league games and led the division as the player with the most yellow cards. Douglas Luiz (10), Edson Alvarez (10) and Joao Palhinha (12) now lead that statistic with six other players tied on nine yellow cards alongside Guimaraes.

Speaking about Guimaraes’ style of play before his first suspension, which came back in November, Eddie Howe revealed he did not want the midfielder to rein in the midfielder’s passion and change his style of play: “It’s like any player, reining in [his aggression] maybe not because you take something away from his natural game,” Howe admitted.

“It’s the bookings that are needless that we want to try and take out of our games. The rules now mean there will be more yellow cards so the referees [have] definitely tightened up over the summer in terms of discipline, time-wasting and loads of little things to the game where you can and some of our players have picked up a yellow card for nothing, or perceived nothing.

“More yellow cards means more suspensions so we have to be careful. But certainly, I don’t want to be taking aggression out of anyone’s game, it’s the indiscipline ones that we want to try and eradicate.”