Nobody with working eyes should be defending Yehor Yarmolyuk here. In the eighth minute of first-half stoppage time at the Gtech Community Stadium on October 17, with both teams waiting for a Liverpool corner, he put his head toward Jérémy Jacquet in a crowded box, off the ball, for no footballing reason on earth. Referee John Brooks was sent to the monitor, took another look, and sent him off for violent conduct. He got it right, and so did VAR. Brentford, up through Keane Lewis-Potter's 44th-minute goal, spent the entire second half a man down, then lost Vitaly Janelt late and finished with nine. Víctor Muñoz and Alexander Isak scored, Liverpool won 2-1, and Brentford's unbeaten start was gone.
The real question is whether any head-to-face contact should be an automatic red, regardless of force, context, or provocation. My answer is yes, and the people reaching for the rulebook as the villain are chasing a problem that doesn't exist.
Start with what's actually on the tape. The contact may have looked soft. Jacquet may have gone down more theatrically than the blow deserved. None of that is the point. The former referees who watched it back saw exactly one thing. Darren Cann called the red card "inevitable for an act of violent conduct." Mike Dean labelled it a "carbon copy" of Rodrigo Bentancur's sending-off a week earlier. He's right.
The Bentancur comparison matters, because that incident actually had a provocation baked in. Luke Shaw shoved Bentancur to the floor; Bentancur got up and planted his head into Shaw's face. By the letter of the law, the second your head goes into an opponent's face, you're off, whatever came first. There's no documented shove, no hand swipe, no provocation from Jacquet at all, and every account of it is an off-the-ball coming-together at a corner. Yarmolyuk lost his head over a set-piece scrum, on camera, while his team was leading. Nobody manhandled him first. That makes his case weaker than Bentancur's.
Now run the alternative. Build in discretion for how hard it was, or whether the other guy stayed on his feet, or who started it, and you get exactly the chaos that drives fans up the wall. Look at Gabriel against Manchester City in April. He moved to headbutt Erling Haaland forehead to forehead, Haaland didn't flinch, and the whole thing was waved away with yellows because the Premier League decided it was "deemed not to be excessively aggressive or violent." Haaland himself thought it should have been red. That's a system where the punishment depends on whether the target chooses to go down. Loosening the law would give us more of exactly that.
A mandatory red for any clear head-to-face action fixes that. It doesn't care whether Jacquet stayed on his feet or who started the jostling. It asks only one question: did a player deliberately move his head into an opponent's face. Yarmolyuk did. Three games, which should keep him out until Brentford's trip to Brighton in early November, assuming the schedule holds.
Keith Andrews is entitled to be furious. He shouldn't aim it at John Brooks, at Darren England, or at a law that did exactly what it's written to do. The only person who cost Brentford a result they had in their hands at half-time is the one who threw his head.
