Not just this game, but the last couple of weeks I've noticed that refs tend to not give yellows for obvious yellow card offenses. Of course it could be just variance and me spotting these kind of situations, but it is not really great, since it makes the "hack'em down" strategy quite good and let McCarthy types just murder creative players a few bad tackles at a time.
Maybe the refs had some kind of meeting which was held by this dude:
Maybe not the greatest back pass from Stones but Howard takes a step back then goes forward. It's more on Howard than Stones from what I can see. Just really bad all around though. Both teams to score looking good though