Lisandro Martinez jumped into Wesley Fofana's face with a raised arm, in his own box, with his team already down a goal and his manager a bad week from the sack. A club in free fall can't keep picking him.
Chelsea beat ten-man Manchester United 2-0 at Stamford Bridge on October 31, with Morgan Rogers and Cole Palmer scoring. Martinez was in the middle of all of it. He was partly at fault for the opener, failing to come across and challenge Rogers as the midfielder surged into the area in the 50th minute. He was booked in the 59th for pulling Rogers back. Three minutes later he threw an arm into Fofana at a corner, picked up a second yellow after a VAR check, and gave away the penalty Palmer buried midway through the second half.
The people in the VAR room didn't hedge. Their review found him jumping into an opponent with his arm raised instead of playing the ball. Referee Peter Bankes called it a reckless challenge with the arm. You don't need to prove Martinez woke up planning to get sent off to know this was self-sabotage. A defender hunting for a body to hit instead of watching the ball has lost control of himself at the exact moment his team could least afford it. This was his second Premier League red card of 2026, after the one against Leeds in April. He'll serve a one-game ban.
It's worse than a brainless moment. Martinez only started this game because Carrick kept trusting him, about two and a half weeks after he publicly took aim at director of football Jason Wilcox and suggested Carrick had been let down by a lack of summer signings. He was fined, summoned to meet club leadership, and apologized on October 15. Then he repaid that trust by handing Chelsea the match.
Carrick's reaction said more than any post-match line could. As Martinez walked off, his manager didn't look at him. Ally McCoist put it plainly on air: Carrick can't look at him, and nor should he. Peter Schmeichel went further, saying Martinez is not a suitable player for Manchester United and that he let Carrick down. When your own club's greatest goalkeeper says that about one of your own, that's a real problem.
The context is real. United sit 16th, with one win from eight games and a point above the relegation zone, on their longest winless run since 1988, and Carrick has spent weeks as the bookmakers' favourite to be the first manager sacked this season. A club that rotten makes every mistake look like a symptom. The hierarchy that assembled this mess owns plenty of it.
None of that gets Martinez off the hook. A 28-year-old World Cup winner, the kind of defender a dressing room is supposed to lean on, doesn't get to plead pressure for swinging an arm at an opponent's head with his side already losing. Anyone reaching for "passion" or "that's just how he plays" is excusing a man who had every chance to be smarter and chose chaos instead, twice in one season.
Carrick has one move left that costs him nothing. Sit him down, long enough for the point to land: self-inflicted disasters cost you your place, even when you're Lisandro Martinez.
