Arsenal v Hull 18 October 2014 – The Match Officials
by Andrew Crawshaw
Before I start on the referee preview here is the table of Wrong Important Decisions, updated to include both the Spurs and Chelsea games.
| Wrong Important Decisions | Favouring Arsenal | Favouring Opponents |
| 2nd Yellow Cards | 0 | 4 |
| Red Cards | 3 | 4 |
| Penalties | 1 | 6 |
| Goals | 0 | 1 |
| Total | 4 | 15 |
| Possible Cost in Points | 2 | 11 |
No signs of things starting to even out yet 15 game changing decisions favouring our opponents and four favouring Arsenal.
Moving on to Saturday’s game
- Referee – Roger East
- Assistants – S Beck and A Nunn
- Fourth Official – C Foy
Roger East was born in 1965, his home County FA is Wiltshire and his first Premier League game was on 1st September 2012 when he was given the Swansea v Sunderland game. Including that game, he has been in charge of 11 Premier games, issuing 4 red and 31 yellow cards. 11 games in two and a bit years – not a lot and leads me to wonder why!
Here are his Premier League Games to Date
| Season | Date | Home | Away | Result | Review of Game |
| 2014/15 | 23 Aug 2014 | Southampton | West Brom | 0 – 0 | |
| 2013/14 | 05 Aug 2013 | Fulham | Stoke | 1 – 0 | |
| 23 Aug 2013 | Everton | West Brom | 0 – 0 | ||
| 28 Dec 2013 | A Villa | Swansea | 1 – 1 | ||
| 28 Jan 2014 | Crystal Palace | Hull | 1 – 0 | ||
| 15 Mar 2014 | Everton | West Brom | 2 – 1 | ||
| 2012/13 | 01 Sep 2012 | Swansea | Sunderland | 2 – 2 | Match Review: Roger East – Swansea City Vs Sunderland (2 – 2) [01/09/2012] |
| 15 Sep 2012 | Fulham | West Brom | 3 – 0 | Match Review: Roger East – Fulham Vs West Bromwich Albion (3 – 0) [15/09/2012] | |
| 20 Oct 2012 | Liverpool | Reading | 1 – 0 | ||
| 08 Dec 2012 | A Villa | Stoke | 0 – 0 | ||
| 23 Feb 2013 | West Brom | Sunderland | 2 – 1 |
No Arsenal games, one game for Hull and only two games have referee reviews. However a strange thing is that West Brom have had him 5 times – that’s nearly half of his games and statistically odd if one were to assume that referees are allocated randomly.
I’ll start with a summary of the two reviewed games – they have to be given a big caveat as both are from two years ago.
Swansea v Sunderland – 99 correct calls out of 117, but adding weighting and he only scored 64% overall, there were 2 wrong Important Decisions (second yellow, red cards, penalties and goals) the bias figures were 35/64 against both teams – Swansea getting the rump of the bad decisions. In Minute 2 Gardner blocked Routledge in the penalty area and Swansea should have had a penalty. In Minute 45+4 Rangel pushed Fletcher in the back when he was going to jump for a free header, should have been a penalty to Sunderland. In Min 70 Flores was correctly sent off for a dangerous high kick on a Sunderland player
Fulham v West Brom – 106 correct calls out of113 and an overall score of 87% once weighting was applied to the decisions. There were no wrong Important Decisions. Bias was 82/18 so Fulham had the majority of the wrong decisions but overall a good performance.
We have of course had Mr East as fourth official – three times last year Palace and Swansea at home and Cardiff away. Two wins and a draw. He was also fourth official this year for our draw with Leicester, let’s hope that wasn’t intended as instructions on how to referee Arsenal.
Mr Beck is a reasonably familiar face – he was assistant at our home games against Southampton and Fulham and our away game at Swansea last year, all of which we won.
Mr Nunn seems to be another first timer for Arsenal and this seems to be his first year in the Premiership
Chris Foy is another ‘old friend’ with a reasonably strong anti-Arsenal bias when in charge.
In Summary
- This is a game where it is impossible to predict what the referee and his team are going to do – there are simply no relevant facts to take into account.
- Hope for the best but expect the worst and be ready to get on his back when (if) he starts to make mistakes.
- He was Fourth Official this year for our game v Leicester refereed by our good “friend” Mr Taylor. Let’s hope he is a better referee than Mr Taylor.
COYG
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The books
- Woolwich Arsenal: The club that changed football – Arsenal’s early years
- Making the Arsenal – how the modern Arsenal was born in 1910
- The Crowd at Woolwich Arsenal
There’s an index to our recent articles and today’s anniversaries on the home page.
A year ago this weekend East wound up Stoke so much in their 0-1 defeat at Craven Cottage that they complained officially to Mike Riley.
Seemingly the complaint struck a vital organ.
Not so young Roger did not pick up a whistle in the PL until the 28th December and has only referred in the top flight four times in the 12 months since incurring the wrath of Sparky.
If Stoke hate him he will do for me.
Just 11 games in 2 years !!
There are only 16 Referees in the Premier League. He is one of those 16.
One would expect all 16 referees to spread out evenly throughout the 380 games in the season, but numbers show otherwise.
Here the matches others have officiated in the past 2 years. 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 respectively.
1. Martin Atkinson – 50 (24+26)
2. Mark Clattenburg – 49 (22+27)
3. Mike Dean – 55 (28+27)
4. Phil Dowd – 53 (26+27)
5. Chris Foy – 45 (21+24)
6. Kevin Friend – 42 (24+18)
7. Mike Jones – 40 (22+18)
8. Andre Marriner – 50 (24+26)
9. Lee Mason – 50 (24+26)
10. Jon Moss – 45 (22+23)
11. Micheal Oliver – 49 (22+27)
12. Lee Probert – 45 (24+21)
13. Neil Swarbrick – 37 (17+20)
14. Anthony Taylor – 44 (25+19)
***
15. Craig Pawson – 10 in 2013-2014 (Was appointed completely in 2013-2014 season)
16. Robert Madley – 5 in 2013-2014 (He was appointed in the June 2013) Just 5 games in one season !!!
Last but not least…
Retired (but worked in last 2 seasons) HOWARD WEBB – 61 games !!!!! (31+30)
Walter, Don, Tony, Andrew these stats might come in handy. 🙂
All stats taken from http://www.soccerbase.com/
🙂
Having 16 referees in a league of 20 teams and 380 games in one season, the ideal ratio of matches per ref should be 23.75 games.
But if you look there are 7 referees who conducted more than 24 games in 2013-2014 season. They are
Martin Atkinson – 26
Mark Clattenburg – 27
Mike Dean – 27
Phil Dowd – 27
Andre Marriner – 26
Lee Mason – 26
Micheal Oliver – 27
Howard Webb – 30 !!
As you can see all 7 seven of these Refs have officiated in more than 3-6 than the average matches per ref (MPF) of 23.75
And mostly those extra matches are like big games involving Top 4 teams + Spurs and Man Utd.
(I will work on that later on) 🙂
So from the stats above I can say one thing for sure, in any of Arsenal’s big games we will see a referee out those 6 names above (except for Howard Webb).
Our big games this season
vs. Man City (Mark Clattenburg)
vs. Spurs (Michael Oliver)
vs. Chelsea (Martin Atkinson)
3 of 6 refs we have already seen in our first 3 big games. How many points we got out of 9…. just 2 🙁 thanks to these refs.
Thanks Andrew. As you say, hard to predict the ref outcome here. Is it possible we may get a level playing field after being sacrificed to the moneyed ? City won last year….is it Chelsea’s turn this year and Utds the next punters? I actually think in my eternal optimistic nature….candide voltaire….best of all worlds and that…could it actually happen this weekend! Ok this may well come back to bite me…..but I predict we will actually get a very rare and precious thing usually granted to the likes of Liverpool….. called a penalty, yes arsenal fans may need to look this word up in some oxford dictionary….but we shall see….
Hull will be tough, we have to be ready for any surprises they will surely have planned.
Hope this ref is a good ref, though if he is now making the break through, he may have now got with the program, or at least seen to be one that will.
It makes no sense that there are so many refs and so little of them get games, after all they really cannot be any worse than Howard Webb and his cronies.
Maybe they are in fact too “good”?
Just for a bit of comparison.
La Liga- 20 Refs
Serie A- 23
Bundesliga- 20
League 1- 21
Eredivisie- 18 the only one with a foreign ref (Denmark)
It seems like a small amount of refs do a majority of the games in these leagues as well but still more than the EPL.
In American sports it looks like this.
MLS- 22
NFL- It was a little harder to figure this one out. A crew of seven does each game and there are a total of 113 officials.
MLB- Crew of 4 that rotates through the various positions on a daily basis. 99 umpires.
NBA- Crew of 3 that rotate positions. 62 total.
NHL- 42refs, 35 linesman
Well another really poor decision for the Hull goal (Hopefully only hull goal!)!