- Arsenal v Chelsea: the referee, recent comparisons and where is Abramovich?
- Arsenal v Chelsea: a visit from little Stamford Creek
By Bulldog Drummond
What I think most of us want most of the time is for referees to adopt the same view of the game as each other, so clubs and players and us supporters, know where they stand, and we know them not to be biased.
So let’s look first of all at our referee this weekend, (Chris Kavanagh) and how different he is from some of his fellows…
| Referee | Games | Fouls pg | Pen pg | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Taylor | 25 | 20.92 | 0.36 | 2.92 |
| Michael Oliver | 21 | 23.24 | 0.10 | 4.57 |
| Chris Kavanagh | 18 | 21.78 | 0.17 | 5.06 |
| Peter Bankes | 17 | 19.35 | 0.29 | 3.88 |
| Robert Jones | 16 | 25.13 | 0.25 | 4.63 |
So these referees have all seen 16 or more Premier League games, and thus they are all expert men at the top of their profession. Yet Robert Jones sees 30% more fouls in each game than Peter Bankees. And let me stress that is not in just one game but in each and every game, on average.
With penalties, it gets even wilder. Anthony Taylor sees 260% more penalties per game than Michael Oliver. And Chris Kavanagh gives out 73% more yellow cards than Anthony Taylor.
So to put it very simply how many fouls, how many penalties and how many yellow cards there are waved around in each game depends mostly on who is the referee, not only who is playing.
And because of this, the results that we get also depend on who is the referee
| Referee | Games | HomeWin% | AwayWin% | Draw% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony Taylor | 25 | 20.0 | 56.0 | 24.0 |
| Michael Oliver | 21 | 28.6 | 42.9 | 28.6 |
| Chris Kavanagh | 18 | 16.7 | 22.2 | 61.1 |
| Peter Bankes | 17 | 58.8 | 35.3 | 5.9 |
| Robert Jones | 16 | 18.8 | 25.0 | 56.3 |
And yes it is true, referees don’t come less in favour of home wins than Kavanagh. By comparison we might note that John Brooks has overseen 69.s% of his matches as home wins.
What Kavanagh is very, very good at is waving yellow cards. He has given out 91 yellow cards this season. Only Oliver has given out more, and he has overseen three more games this season than Kavanagh.
Now yellow cards are of interest because of the total yellow card table which shows Chelsea as the most yellow carded team in the league with 76, as opposed to Arsenals’ 53 – that is Chelsea have had 43% more yellows than Arsenal.
But now lets look at where these pesky yellow things come from
| Team | Fouls | Unprofessional | Other |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chelsea | 42 | 8 | 28 |
| Arsenal | 33 | 2 | 25 |
So you may be asking, what does “other” mean? And I hope you are asking that because Untold Arsenal is also asking that, and we have even gone so far as to ask the people who have compiled this table what “other” means, and do you know, they either can’t or won’t tell us. This is alarming because 47% of Arsenal’s yellow cards come from “other” reasons.
And no one seems to know what those other reasons are. We’ve written to all the people we can think of who might know what “other” means in this context but none of them want to explore the issue with us.
If you know, or if you know anyone who might know, or indeed if you feel you would like to take a guess, then please send in a comment, because it is a bit dodgy not knowing quite what almost half of Arsenal’s cards are for.
What we can say is that none of these “other” offences are for diving, for the official table includes a column for that and it shows that not a single player this season has been carded for diving this season.
So it is not for a foul, not for diving, and not for unprofessional conduct, but it is something else.
Now, I guess we would not worry about this if we were dealing with a referee organisation that is open and above board in everything it does, but PGMO isn’t. It is a secret society, so we can’t write to them and ask them. We can’t consult their website because they don’t have one.
And we can’t ask how come Bournemouth commit twice as many fouls a ManC (in the eyes of the referees). Maybe Bournemouth are a thoroughly dirty team, but of course, we can’t inspect any of the data.
Plus, we can’t ask why John Brooks gives out 5.46 yellow cards on average in each game while Stuart Atwell gives out 3.47 yellow cards per game. That is a difference of 57% which seems rather large when it comes to something as important as yellow cards. I mean, a club that sees Atwell a lot is pretty much bound to be picking up fewer cards than a club that sees Brooks.
But on all such subjects, PGMO and their pals in the media remain utterly silent.
