Granit Xhaka receives first red card in 32 months for foul on former Tottenham player

Former Arsenal captain and now Bayer Leverkusen midfielder Granit Xhaka received his first red card in almost three years in Switzerland’s 2-0 defeat to Denmark in the UEFA Nations League.

The match, played in Copenhagen, took a chaotic turn in the second half, with two Swiss players sent off, including Xhaka, who ended his 966-day streak without a sending off.

The drama began to unfold when Switzerland’s Nico Elvedi was controversially sent off in the 52nd minute for a foul on Kasper Dolberg.

Initially given a yellow card by German referee Daniel Siebert, the decision was changed to a red card following a VAR check.

This infuriated Xhaka and the rest of the Swiss team, who believed Dolberg had hooked Elvedi before the foul, making the sending off unfair. Xhaka did not mince his words in his post-match criticism.

“It’s a huge scandal for me,” Xhaka said, referring to Elvedi’s red card. “To go out and watch only part of the action and not the whole thing, I’ve never seen anything like it before. You have to see the whole picture, not just part of it.”

With Switzerland reduced to 10 men, Denmark took control of the game and tensions on the pitch quickly rose.

After 82 minutes, Patrick Dorgu scored Denmark’s first goal with Switzerland forward Breel Embolo lying injured, sparking further outrage from Xhaka and his team-mates.

They felt Denmark had shown poor sportsmanship by continuing to play instead of putting the ball into play, as Switzerland had done earlier in the match when a Danish player was injured.

“In football, the word ‘respect’ is capitalized,” Xhaka said. “What the Danish players did had nothing to do with respect. The Danes saw Breel lying on the ground, they just kept playing and scored. That’s how the 1-0 happened, and the rest is history.”

Just five minutes after Denmark took the lead, Xhaka let his emotions get the better of him.

In the 87th minute, the Swiss captain fouled former Tottenham Hotspur midfielder Pierre-Emile Højbjerg with a late but not particularly dangerous tackle.

However, having already been shown a yellow card for dissent four minutes earlier, the foul resulted in a second yellow card for Xhaka, leading to his sending off.

Looking back on that moment after the match, Xhaka admitted: “It happened. That it shouldn’t happen, I know that too. I’ve become calmer in recent years, but I’m a very emotional person, especially when things go wrong.”

Despite his red card, Xhaka did not want to hear the referee’s explanation. “He saw straight away that we didn’t want to hear it at all,” Xhaka said.

Denmark added to Switzerland’s misery by scoring a second goal in added time, through Højbjerg to seal a 2-0 win. Switzerland, reduced to nine men after Xhaka’s sending off, had no chance of a comeback in the dying moments of the match.

Xhaka later apologised to his team-mates on social media, acknowledging the impact his dismissal had on the result.

The red card is the 16th of Xhaka’s professional career, which saw him make 735 appearances for club and country. Although he was booked 76 times as an Arsenal player, his five red cards during his time in England were straight ones. He never received a single red card.

Although the midfielder has made progress in mastering his discipline issues, the events in Copenhagen show that his passion can still sometimes lead to errors of judgment.

His suspension means he will miss Switzerland’s next Nations League match against Spain, leaving his side to recover from a frustrating night in Denmark.