Rodrigo Bentancur lost Tottenham a man at Old Trafford, and half of football has spent the hours since trying to hang it on Luke Shaw. Shaw shoved him, got in his face, wanted a reaction and got one. All true. None of it put Bentancur's forehead into another man's face.
Manchester United went ahead through Bryan Mbeumo in the 73rd minute. A few minutes later, with a little over ten to play, Bentancur flew into a tackle, launched the ball away, and Shaw shoved him to the ground in frustration. Bentancur got straight back up and moved his head towards Shaw. Stuart Attwell showed the straight red. There was nothing to think about.
The case for punishing Shaw too goes like this: his shove was forceful, he was clearly trying to provoke, and a defender who baits an opponent into self-destruction shouldn't skip away clean. The first two parts are fair. Shaw wasn't innocent here, and nobody sensible is pretending he was. But a push, however pointed, has basically never been a red card in this sport, and it wasn't going to become one because the man on the receiving end decided to answer it with his skull. Winding someone up is gamesmanship. A headbutt is a red card.
The people most upset about Shaw keep skipping the order of events. Bentancur went flying into the tackle first. That's what lit the fuse. He was already playing with fire, and then he gave Shaw the one thing a referee can't ignore. Shaw provoked a reaction. Bentancur picked the dumbest reaction available to a professional footballer.
Demand Shaw walk too if you want, but ask what that actually fixes. It doesn't undo Bentancur's sending-off or give Spurs their man back. It just softens the fact that an experienced international torched his own team's afternoon over a shove, at 1-0 down, when Tottenham could least afford it.
Spurs refused to lie down, and that's what spared this match a longer postmortem. Down to ten, chasing the game, they dragged a point out of it when Dominic Solanke equalised in the 92nd minute for a 1-1 draw. United were ahead, a man up, and still couldn't close it out. That's its own embarrassment, one for another day.
The equaliser doesn't rewrite the sending-off, though. Shaw played it cynically, and a word in his ear about that would be fair enough. The red card belongs to Bentancur, start to finish. He threw the tackle, then he threw the head, and he did it to a player whose entire job in that moment was to get exactly this out of him. The only person who punished Tottenham was the one wearing their shirt.
