Nicolas Jackson will be suspended for Chelsea’s top five run-in after he was sent off during the 2-0 defeat away at Newcastle.<\/p>\n
The Senegalese striker was chasing a long ball when he appeared to catch Sven Botman with his forearm in the face.<\/p>\n
The challenge was enough to see the Dutch centre-back fall to the floor, with VAR sending referee John Brookes to the monitor.<\/p>\n
He now misses the remaining two matches of the season, against Manchester United and Nottingham Forest – with the outcome against Forest likely to decide the Blues’ Champions League fate.<\/p>\n
Jackson will also miss the 2025\/26 Premier League opening game.<\/p>\n
Chelsea manager Enzo Maresca said: “For him, the season is finished. We have still two Premier League games that are both important and the red card, I said that if the referee decides it’s a red card its because they decide and they are convinced its a red card.<\/p>\n
“The only thing is that for some decisions sometimes it looks to easy to make some decisions in this stadium with this noise.”<\/p>\n
Both teams were level on 63 points heading into today, but the win for Newcastle has pushed them up into third place and only two points behind Arsenal in second.<\/p>\n
They face the Gunners at the Emirates stadium next week before hosting Everton on the final day, needing just three more points to guarantee a Champions League spot.<\/p>\n
Newcastle boss Eddie Howe said: “I thought Chelsea did really well but we hung in there. We’re on the road to what we want to do this season, but there’s still a lot of work to do and two tough fixtures to play. The size of the prize is huge, the players are aware of that.”<\/p>\n
At half-time, Maresca introduced Reece James for Noni Madueke which allowed Moises Caicedo to go back into his normal defensive midfielder role from inverted right-back, whilst Cole Palmer drifted as a false nine.<\/p>\n
The tactics certainly improved the Blues, who started to dominate possession after suffering without it for most of the first-half.<\/p>\n
However, the lack of a striker meant Chelsea failed to take any of their chances, with the best one coming from the head of Reece James inside the box.<\/p>\n
Maresca praised: “Second half the team showed effort, spirit, energy, unbelievable. We must keep this spirit and energy for Friday.<\/p>\n
“We had three clear chances in the second half, Cucurella, Enzo and Reece. The important thing is to arrive there. Unfortunately we didn’t score.”<\/p>\n
Sandro Tonali opened the scoring inside two minutes after Romeo Lavia was robbed of the ball on the edge of his penalty area.<\/p>\n
Jackson saw red in the 35th minute as frustration combined with petulance saw him flail has arm towards Botman’s face.<\/p>\n
The points were wrapped up by the Toon Army in the 90th minute as Bruno Guimaraes’ long-range shot took a wicked deflection that looped over the helpless Robert Sanchez and into the top corner.<\/p>\n
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Nicolas Jackson will be suspended for Chelsea’s top five run-in after he was sent off during the 2-0 defeat away at Newcastle. The Senegalese striker was chasing a long ball when he appeared to catch Sven Botman with his forearm in the face. The challenge was enough to see the Dutch centre-back fall to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-latest-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4626"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4628,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4626\/revisions\/4628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chelseabluesnews.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}