I need some tips for event photography.

I did my second event photography a few weeks ago, and while the client was satisfied, I was not. I took too many pictures, and that's why I was able to send the a lot of the good ones to the client, but about 20-25% of picture were really not upto the mark.

Most of them were blurry, even though I used auto focus, since I didn't want to risk missing the focus with manual, but the auto focus didn't really react to the faces sometimes.

Then another problem I faced was that, when I was taking group photos, I took about 5 photos for each group, out of those 5, about 3 had people with their eyelids halfway or fully closed. Is this a me problem, or something that I can avoid by changing the shutter speed?

I feel like I took a lot of redundant pictures.

I need some help.