“The manager came to talk to me,” Kouyaté remembers in a Palace TV interview. “He said: ‘I don’t want you playing in this game because if you take a yellow card you’re going to be suspended for the next game.’
“I said: ‘No, no, I want to play.’ We played like five minutes, and I went into my first contact and the referee came in and gave me my yellow card. I am so angry with the referee, I’m going head to head with him.
“Sadio and [Idrissa] Gana [Gueye] came in and said: ‘Don’t do that, it’s okay, relax.’ I said: ‘No, it’s hard for me not to play the next game.'”