Town boss Kieran McKenna says referee Simon Hooper told him striker Liam Delap was booked in the melee following last week’s 2-1 win at Wolves as “there’s a rule that if there’s a fracas on the pitch, then somebody from both teams has to be booked”.
The yellow card came in a post-match incident in which home defender Rayan Ait-Nouri was given his second caution and then a red card and Matheus Cunha was charged by the FA later in the week for clashing with a member of the Town security team.
Delap’s booking, which wasn’t immediately obvious from the TV footage, took him to five for the season and sees him banned from Saturday’s home game against Newcastle United.
McKenna says he sought clarification regarding the yellow card from referee Hooper following his post-match press conference at Molineux.
"In terms on what went on, I spoke to the referee after the press conference and he said that there’s a rule - and I’ve got other things to worry about other than the referees - he said that there’s a rule that if there’s a fracas on the pitch, then somebody from both teams has to be booked, which somebody else will have to check to see if that’s true or not, but I take him at face value on that,” he said.
"I’ve watched back the incident, I was in and around it at the time and I don’t see any particular fracas from our players or anything particularly untoward from our players, but Liam got booked within that.
"We’re disappointed to lose him for tomorrow, no doubt about that, I think he’s been in really good form, I have to say, I know he hadn’t scored in the last few games, but I think he’s playing really well for the team and, of course, with George [Hirst] out, we don’t want to lose both of them.
"So it makes it a different challenge for this weekend, but a different challenge is always a different opportunity as well, an opportunity for other people to step up and bring their strengths to the team and a good challenge for us in terms of adapting to the strength of whoever comes into the team and trying to make the team as competitive as possible.”
McKenna has plenty of players in his squad who have played as strikers with Ali Al-Hamadi the most obvious but with Sammie Szmodics, who is available having been ill last week, Omari Hutchinson, Nathan Broadhead and Conor Chaplin alternatives of a different variety.
"It’s pretty clear, we’ve probably got four or five people in the building, who have played as a striker,” he continued. "There’s the more obvious ones, but Wes Burns has played as a striker as well, so we’ve got quite a few options there.
"Obviously Ali is the most natural forward that we have in the building in terms of the profile of striker that we usually play with but we also know he’s short of match minutes for quite a long period.
"You’ve got other people, who can fill the role in slightly different positions. You look at last week, there was a lot of the game where Omari was in central positions and almost centre forward positions at times in the game.
"I think what’s important is we have different qualities within the squad. We know that we’re going to need different people to step up across the 96 minutes. I think it’s a game and it’s a sport now, to be honest, certainly at Premier League level, where it’s genuinely not necessarily about the team that starts being any more important than the team that finishes.
"We’ve got a team in mind to start the game, we’ve got a team in mind to finish the game. You try and pick balance across different qualities to start the game and balance across different qualities to finish the game, depending on the game state.
"We’ve looked at that over the last few days and we’ll try and give ourselves the best chance on Saturday.”