By Tony Attwood
In my earlier piece These football commentaries get ridiculous when key issues are always ignored I explored what is happening in terms of the way people write about football in the media. And that article leads, in my view, to one other obvious question: how did such a situation not only come to be the norm, but come to be accepted without question? Why is this current Arsenal season seen as a such a huge failure that all the progress of the previous two or three seasons should be thrown aside, the manager removed and a new approach adopted?
The point is, Arsenal have had problems this season because they have had have had more injuries than any other club by a long way this season. If he has not read the piece maybe the honourable journalists who are proclaiming major changes being needed by Arsenal now, might like to take a look: the title says it all. Just how many more injuries has Arsenal had than any other team this season?
And then there is the card situation. What has been going on with cards this season is a question worth asking because when a journalist just states one snippet of a set of facts and ignores the rest, you know something odd is going on with his statistics. So here are the actual yellow card statistics. They are published by Who Scored – you can check them here
It shows the number of yellow cards per club and divides them into three sections based on the reasons for the cards. If you are a regular reader you will know we have repeatedly appealed for information on what (in terms of yellow cards) the “other” column actually includes, but no one has told us and sadly we have not been able to persuade any journalists to ask the question. If only PGMO were not such a secretive organisation, they would have a “help desk” wherein we could ask the question, and get an answer!
This table reveals the clubs with the lowest number of yellow cards this season, according to the breakdown in WhoScored.
| Pos | Team | Fouls | Unprofessional | Other |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Brentford | 38 | 4 | 16 |
| 2 | Newcastle | 40 | 5 | 20 |
| 3 | Arsenal | 41 | 2 | 27 |
| 4 | Manchester City | 41 | 4 | 13 |
But hang on, you might be saying, what about the red cards, and yes Arsenal are top of the red card league with six. But then doesn’t that seem a bit strange when right near the bottom of the league in terms of yellow cards?
So now we have two mysteries. Around half of the yellow cards Arsenal got this season are for “other” reasons that no one has so far explained, and a club with one of the lowest numbers of yellow cards totals, (Arsenal) has got the highest number of red cards. And on top of this we have a major newspaper commentator ranting on and on about Arsenal being a dirty team, but failing to mention that Arsenal is almost bottom for the number of cards from fouls or wondering about the “other” figure, but simply talking about red cards. Why not, if the whole situation is so clear and Arsenal are such a dirty team, bring in the yellow situation too? Why not ask what the “other” column means. Why not ask why all the data isn’t seriously looked at in places other than on Untold?
And there is something important here, because the red cards often come from two yellow cards. So are these table counting yellow cards twice? It seems so.
And here’s another thing. Chelsea have had 97 yellows this season compared to 64 for Arsenal. That is roughly a third more yellows for Chelsea than for Arsenal. Is that not worth a mention if one is doing an article about indiscipline rather than just mentioning Arsenal? Why focus on six reds for Arsenal rather than 97 yellows for Chelsea?
And all this comes before we start to think about how different referees hand out cards in different ways. The table below shows that the number of fouls per game seen by different referees this season varies only by 17%. Said another way, one regular ref seeing the most fouls sees 17% more fouls than the regular ref seeing the least fouls.
| Referee | Games | Fouls pg | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|---|
| John Brooks | 16 | 22.63 | 5.38 |
| Simon Hooper | 23 | 20.04 | 4.61 |
| .Tim Robinson | 14 | 23.43 | 4.57 |
| Michael Oliver | 25 | 23.44 | 4.44 |
| Darren England | 19 | 23.32 | 4.21 |
| Andy Madley | 18 | 23.44 | 4.00 |
| Stuart Attwell | 19 | 21.26 | 3.89 |
| Peter Bankes | 22 | 20.23 | 3.77 |
| Anthony Taylor | 30 | 21.27 | 2.83 |
So when it comes to yellow cards the most profligate waver of cards shows twice as many cards as the least card-waving refs. In short, how many cards are waved in a game is basically a matter of which referee you get. So a club that gets Brooks a lot, is going to pick up many more cards than a club that gets Taylor a lot.
Thus “having to play for the sixth time this sean with 10 men” as the newspaper puts it, is as likely to be down to which referees Arsenal have had, as it is likely to be down to their style of play. And the fact that Arsenal are so near the foot of the yellow card table, it seems almost certain that Arsenal get more red cards, because they are regularly given referees who are known to wave the reds a lot.
