What’s wrong with PL Refs: Case study – Tottenham Hotspur

8 Replies to “What’s wrong with PL Refs: Case study – Tottenham Hotspur”

1. Lad this is an interesting enough read but does need a lot of caveats which in fairness you do attempt to address.

   Basically all this tells is how Tottenham have fared when certain referees have been in charge of their games but is not evidence of how they are likely to perform if the same referee was not be in charge of their next game.

   One could argue that if you were to do a similar analysis by weather or temperatures or kick off time you could also draw some conclusions but I am not sure any of this, like your analysis would carry any statistical significance.

   Teams go through runs of form, even in Spurs case they have improved a great deal over the last few years so I would expect the stats of current referees to potentially be above average in favour of Spurs.

   Also bad referring decisions against a team does not ultimately cost that team the game e.g. Gareth Bale ‘winning’ the penalty at the Emirates last season.

   So while I did take time to read I would not use the above analysis to form any judgement on what the result is going to be the next time any of the above referees are in charge of a Tottenham game.

2. I’ve read quite a few of these referee case studies waiting for a valid point to turn up but alas there is none. The whole referee case study is based on statistics, and in my opinion they’re statistics that don’t really influence a game. As I’ve heard quoted; you can prove anything with statistics except the truth.
   Referees have a hard enough job as it is, having to make momentary judgements without the aid of the slow-mo replays that we all get to see at home on the tellybox, having to deal with primadonna players using bad language and arguing aggressively, and having to deal with pressure from the stands. It’s not surprising that sometimes they get decisions wrong and make mistakes. Having 12 referees there will be some that make more mistakes than others, and some that make mistakes that end up benefiting certain teams and sometimes those mistakes will influence the result of a game – I believe its the law of averages. It’s always been this way so why don’t we move on. This case study uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts – for support rather than for illumination.

3. as with all these, an interesting read. Was expecting Mike Dean to be top dog for them, but maybe my perceptions have been wrong or maybe he was in some way Arry skewed? Will assumeusing these criteria they get a better deal from the refs than us, although of course that remains to be seen!.. Reading all this makes me… at least wonder about the reasons behind it. Spurs now, like us have a foreign manager who does not appear to court the media in quitethe way Arry did,is unlikely to be the next England manager, and does not seem to have too much to do with Fergies LMA clique of stoneage home grown managers, wonder if this will have any effect over time?

4. A better indicator would be the referee’s record against a certain team

   Someone like Atkinson may be a good ref against the likes of Sunderland or West Brom but not against Chelsea

   And I doubt any Spurs fan thinks of Webb as a good ref

5. don’t worry you will see each ref with the different teams in the next weeks 😉

6. It is amazing that from most other teams we get comments (look at the Swansea article) who can talk about it and see it as it is: an exercise in trying to see who is statistically a good ref or a bad ref for the team in question. Nothing more, nothing less.

   And people have to look at it in a larger picture. We do judge the decisions on the field also in different articles. We did this last year. So we do know the impact bad decisions do have on the outcome of a game.

   But the thing is to see if you combine those two things, is that we can see if some things are based on coincidence (a bad day at the office from the ref) or having a continued number of defeats going against all other reasonable trends (a probable biased ref).

   But of course we could publish all this in one article that would have the length of a 350 pages book … that nobody would read.

   So don’t worry, we will put all and everything together: these statistics and the actual referee reviews and then we will have more a case if we see strange things.

   And starting a comment with abuse is not the right way to get your comment published. If you don’t know how to write a decent comment I can point you at the Swansea supporters in this article http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/27824

   And you don’t have to agree with the articles to have your say in a decent way. You can disagree without insults. Just try it.

7. “I believe its the law of averages. It’s always been this way so why don’t we move on.”
   Man Overboard,
   Intestingly you invoke (I believe….) “the lAW of averages” and yet you reject statistics as evidence for something awry (bias). How about that? And you in effect are claiming that it all evens out in the end. Now would the end be in the same season? over two seasons? 5? 10? decades? centuries? How long do you need to prove you are right? No. You have a quaint belief system that spits in the face of the hard work of observation which (without inside poop from the hives of riley) is the best we can get. Yours is an act of faith. What Walter and refs do is open observational work plus open interpretation of that work and, if you cared enough about this to inspect it, you could try to refute it. But you don’t want to care enough, because it’s more comfortable to just assume that the best will prevail and it will all even out via “the law of averages.” You’re not man overboard; you’re comfortably in the boat.

8. Man Overboard
   ‘you can prove anything with statistics except the truth.’
   A convenient phrase to hide behind and often quoted by people who have little contradictory evidence of their own to present. Ditto for ‘it all evens out in the end’ which you also imply.
   Do you dispute the ‘truth’ of the league table which after all is just a collection of facts presented in a statistical form?