By Tony Attwood
It is a rather strange fact, but football journalists find it hard to write much of a piece or get involved in much of a report without the word “dossier”. The idea is to pretend that manager are generally so bereft of tactical ideas in terms of how to deploy their players make secret plans. But “secret plans” sounds a bit naff so the media suggest the manager has created a “dossier”. We never actually get to see the evidence that a dossier exists, or what is in it, but we are told it is there. A “secret dossier”, which no one else knows about (except other journos who have invented the notion of one at exactly the same time).
Non-secret dossiers of course are everywhere – they consist of actual facts about how the opposition play, who needs marking, where space can be run into and so on. They tell us that player X is totally left footed so always goes past a player marking him on the player’s right, forcing the defender to turn, and all that sort of thing.
These are decent and helpful bits of information, and are important where they are built on real observation, for they can tell you where the opposition’s weakness is, and thus how to take advantage of that knowledge.
Except for one thing. Every match is filmed, and every club in the league does this sort of analysis, so the opposition is perfectly aware of that, and so they work on planning how to overcome what they imagine the dossier will say. Thus there is a dossier and an anti-dossier. All based on who each side expects to be in the other team’s lineup. While of course the opposition manager tries to outwit his opponents by occasionally picking someone different, or using substitutes in a tactical way.
Obviously this is all rather old hat – we’ve heard it all before, so the journalists look for other tales, of which one circulating at the moment is that the Arsenal management truly believe there is a conspiracy against their club, by referees. Again there is no evidence that there is that specific belief, but it is a thought shared among some journos. Arsenal management, they say, are conspiracy theorists.
To see if this is so, let us pause for a moment and see which teams get the most yellow and red cards this season. And to avoid any allegation of bias I thought I might publish the whole table this morning, which comes from ESPN and which appeared after all clubs had played eight games. It shows yellow cards totals and only applies to league games, not cup games. I’ve marked Arsenal in red just in case you think you’ve missed them as you scan down.
- 22 cards: Newcastle and Bournemouth
- 21 cards: Hull City
- 19 cards: Brentford
- 18 cards: Aston Villa
- 17 cards: Nottingham Forest, Liverpool and Brighton and Hove
- 16 cards: Fulham and Manchester United
- 15 cards: Everton, Chelsea, and Leeds
- 13 cards: Manchester City, Sunderland and Ipswich Town
- 12 cards: Crystal Palace and Tottenham Hots
- 10 cards: Arsenal
- 8 cards: Coventry City
So when the media or fans talk about Arsenal being targeted by referees they are wrong, that is not the case, at least in terms of cards waved. Indeed if you wanted to work on some wild theories you could try one relating to Arsenal have paid off all the referees so that we don’t many cards. (I have no evidence of that).
Where Arsenal might be doing poorly – but I can’t find figures – is on having bookings for the manager leaving his technical area – Arteta has had two such it appears, but I can’t find a table showing how other managers have been punished if at all, nor (more importantly) how many have left the area but not been warned or punished. Although I did see a report which announced that former referee Graham Scott said something to the effect that, “There are managers who have the record in the league, 36 times in 10 minutes [they] leave the touchline – no yellows,”
However if that is a problem, the League Management Committee or whoever looks into this stuff can tell the PGMO to hire an extra man for each game who has the power to wave cards at managers who leave their own area. One departure is a warning, two means a final warning, three means a yellow card and four means a red and off you go to the stand.
Unfortunately the Guardian’s piece descends quickly into childish humour and we don’t get any more statistics, but the report does tell us that, “Declan Rice mystifyingly got away with kicking Malick Yalcouyé off the ball against Brighton…” and then does a bit of sarcasm about Arsenal seeing themselves as victims. How many other players kicked out is not revealed – which of course is the usual problem with football reporting – it is invariably utterly sporadic.
Indeed the real problem is that we don’t have proper statistics published by the PGMO as to what referees do. We have to dig around and find them ourselves – mostly from Who Scored where you can find that Stuart Attwell has handed out 5.4 yellow cards per game this season while Thomas Bramall has handed out 2.2 per game. Each has overseen five games in the PL this season. That is a difference – across five games – of over 100%.
Or maybe we should note that Peter Bankess this season has overseen six games and two thirds of them have been home wins. Whereas Jarred Gillett has overseen six games this season and two thirds of them have been away wins. Although that is not as bad as Stuart Atwell for whom 80% of his games have been away wins.
And yes, of course it can be argued that the referees have seen matches where the away teams are particularly strong – except it goes on with these wild variances every season, and the media never mention them once. And all I ask is, why is that?
