After the Fire's 2 game slugfest with DC, is any player is trouble with caution points? I think everyone is available for the Revs game Friday. Does anything short of a red card Friday endanger players for the final? How many points gets you a suspension for the Cup game?
Not sure what the playoff rules are (God knows rules change as often as Mathis' hair in MLS). Last I checked there were 4 (maybe 5) guys with yellows going into Fridays match.
Caution points were rebooted after the season. Consecutive game cautions could still result in a suspension though. So far, no one on the Fire has received more than one caution in the last two games, so we should be good to go unless someone gets tossed from the next game.
Yellows As I understand it (which could be incorrect) two yellows will have you sitting out next game. Here are yellows picked up in the first two games, thus if they get a yellow Friday, they'd sit out the Final. Razov Curtin Williams Whittfield Marsch Beasley Perez
What they announced as far as "rules" go during one of the playoff broadcasts was that it was 13 caution points to miss the final. I don't believe 13 can be done with only 2 yellow cards.
The yellow card point slate was wiped clean at the end of the regular season. According to what can be found on MLSnet, everyone starts over for the playoffs. The first suspension comes after 21 points. There is no way you can get 21 points in three matches. The only posssible yellow card suspension would be for the MLS Cup by getting three straight yellows. Only one person has an opportunity to accomplish that, and that is Brian Mullan of SJ (he has managed to get a yellow in each of the first two playoff matches). Yellow card points range from 3 to 5 depending upon the seriousness of the transgression.
So it would appear that no Fire player would be in danger of missing the final unless he draws 2 yellows or a straight red in this conference final.
I believe that during the first Fire-D.C. game the announcers were discussing this, and I thought they said if a player gets 8 caution points during the first 2 games, he will sit out the next game. Also it would accumulate, and 10 caution points over 3 games makes the player miss the final. I'm doing this from memory, but since I have the game on tape, I could go back and try to get an exact quote. My problem is that I can't find any record of where the players are in terms of caution points. Since a yellow card can be 3 -5 points ( I have to take your word on this) the points assigned by the ref (or league?) should be made available somewhere. Also can a player be given 1 or 2 caution points for some lesser infraction?
I just went back and checked the game tape from the first Fire - D.C. game. According to Jack Edwards at the 29th min. He states that 8 caution points over 2 games, or 10 caution points over 3 games and the player is out for the next game.
Noah, Thanks for the additional info. One might think that the appropriate place to find such info would be on MLSnet, but I guess they don't care about letting the great unwashed know what's going on. (And I must admit that the last place I would have expected to find such info would have been on USSoccer's site - oh well.) The yellow cards are listed on MLSnet, but strangely not the accumulated points, unlike during the regular season. Maybe they haven't figured it out yet, or, more posssibly, (gratuitous dig) they're just lazy.
What exactly did the US Soccer link say? I don't have the time to read through the bit about card and point accumulation.