5. We Need To Talk About Kevin
After being so roundly beaten, it's probably a little churlish to discuss the referee's performance but I'm going to. In the twelfth minute, Damian Delaney was rightly booked for a silly late challenge on Diego Costa and there can be no complaints about that. What stuck in the craw was Kevin Friend's decisions not to punish Chelsea players for similar, if not worse, challenges. Most notably letting John Obi Mikel get away with a late challenge on Joel Ward and a nasty rake down James McArthur's shins - all inside the first thirty minutes. Bookings are not an irrelevance, they set the tone of individual player's games. Delaney's booking so early on meant that he could no longer tackle anyone as one mistimed attempt meant that he would walk, yet as Mikel was given the freedom of Selhurst Park to do what he wanted, there were no such worries for him when committing to challenges. Palace were well beaten and deserved to lose but the least they should expect is for the referee to treat fouls equally and it's hard to argue that Kevin Friend did that.