Darren England is the referee for Everton game, and what that means

 

 

• Everton v Arsenal, and why Arsenal should not copy Manchester C
• Arsenal: more club trained English players than any other Premier League club.

By Tony Attwood

Darren England will be the match official for Arsenal v Everton with Scott Ledger and Akil Howson his assistants. Bobby Madley is the fourth official with Stuart Attwell on VAR.

As usual we have a look at how Darren England compares with other referees, first by looking at his whistle-blowing tactics.

 

Referee	Games	Fouls pg	Yel pg	Red pg
1.Anthony Taylor	25	20.92	2.92	0.08
3.Chris Kavanagh	19	21.84	5.11	0.21
6.Robert Jones	18	25.33	4.28	0.22
8.Peter Bankes	18	19.61	3.78	0.11
12.Darren England	14	23.36	4.21	0.21
13.John Brooks	14	22.71	5.36	0.00
16.Jarred Gillett	11	22.45	4.36	0.00

 

Darren England sees 23.26 fouls per game that is 19% more fouls per game than Peter Bankes.  A huge difference.

He hands out 4.21 yellow cards a game which is 44% more than Anthony Taylor but 21% fewer than John Brooks.   In fact Brooks is now waving 83% more yellow cards than Taylor, which is bonkers. 

If a team with a number of players teetering on the edge of having players suspended gets Taylor as a referee, there will be a universal sigh of relief in the club, and that is not how it should be.   It opens the gate to corruption – a club with too many yellow cards and getting players close to the edge of suspension, might even be tempted to offer an inducement just to have Taylor do the match.  I am not sayikng this has happened, but the threat of such an eventuality is there.

But England is right near the top of the red card list – while some referees have never once held their red card, only one ref waves the red card more often.

I can only make the old point yet again – why is there this extreme variation in the behaviour of referees in seeing and punishing wrong-doing on the pitch?  It can only be explained in one of these ways…

1. The referee is flagrantly biased toward and against certain clubs
2. The referees are not trained properly to distinguish what is a cardable offence and what not
3. PGMO simply couldn’t care a toss, knowing that the media will never ever touch this issue no matter how bad things get.
4. It is simply not possible to judge these matters quickly on the pitch.  This would mean the whole basis of giving yellow and red cards is at a whim which is not really what we want.  It would suggest all of football is a lottery.

Quite possibly however all of the first three points are true – and that really does show how bent the Premier League has become.

So what about the Darren England results?  Just look at the astonishing variation in these figures…

 

Referee	Games	HomeWin%	AwayWin%	Draw%
Anthony Taylor	25	20.0	56.0	24.0
Chris Kavanagh	19	21.1	21.1	57.9
Peter Bankes	18	61.1	33.3	5.6
John Brooks	14	71.4	14.3	14.3
Darren England	14	35.7	50.0	14.3
Darren Bond	12	66.7	8.3	25.0
Michael Salisbury	10	40.0	60.0	0.0

 

The home win percentage among these Premier League referees ranges from 20% up to 71%.   The away win percentage (and remember these are all experienced Premier League referees) ranges from 8.3% up to 60%!!!   And the draw percentage ranges from none to a whacking great 57.9% (I’ve run out of exclamtion marks to cover this).

Now I am not saying the numbers should all be the same – obviously there will be some variatons.  But we know from repeated experiments that referees are influenced by the crowd (this was shown through a series of university-based experiments where the effect of the crowd on referees was carefully measured.)

What we can say in Arsenal’s favour is the referee England is not influenced by the home crowd and is perfectly willing to allow the away team to win, if they are better.   And as we saw in the previous piece Arsenal are indeed better away from home than Everton are at home.

So maybe this time the referee will see this game in his normal way and favour the away team.   Of course, there should be no referee bias one way or the other, but the statistics show that a) there is bias, b) PGMO are unwilling or incapable of doing anything about it, and c) the media are either instructed by PGMO not to touch the subject, or they believe their readers can’t handle numbers and revealing them will reduce readership.