Arsenal v Bolton: football (but not as we know it), referees and Nic Anelka

 

 

• PGMOL are not incompetent, so stop saying they are

By Bulldog Drummond

As noted in the last article the referee for this game is Josh Smith.  He is a referee who is tentatively being given a chance to move from the rough and tumble of the Championship into the Premier League.

Now as anyone who watches matches outside the Premier League as well as PL games will know, the approach to refereeing further down the leagues is quite different with the referees seemingly making allowances for a lack of pace, lack of skill and occasional clumsiness in the lower leagues, in order to try and keep the 22 players on the pitch.   So a referee moving between the two leagues has to adjust considerably from game to game.

It is a far from adequate way of developing referees, but of course, it cannot be questioned because the Secret Society (also known as PGMO, the organisation with no press office and no website) won’t tell us what it does.  Apart from announcing that it has run out of money now its employees are wanting more because they can’t referee in Saudi any more.

So here we look at Mr Smith’s four Premier League games last season, and from this season his four Championship games and his one Premier League game.

 

Referee	Games	Fouls pg	Tackle/ Foul	Yel pg
Josh Smith PL2023/4	4	23.25	1.29	3.75
Josh Smith Champ 2024/5	4	23.00	1.33	5.00
Josh Smith PL 2024/25	1	17.00	1.89	3.00
Average PL 2024/25		23.80	1.58	3.60

 

As we can see, Josh Smith in the Premier League is seeing fouls far less often than his compatriots in this league, and is allowing a significantly higher number of tackles go through before handing out a yellow card.  As such he is handing out fewer yellow cards that the average Premier League referee this season.

But of course we are only looking at one game this season.  If we look at his Championship record this season he is handing out many more yellow cards, while his Premier League work this season is close to the average.

Thus we find something very undesirable is happening here.   The experience of handling both Premier League and Championship games means that he is getting his Premier League performance at close to the average for yellow cards, but when called upon to work in the Championship he is now judging the Championship players by Premier League standards.

Of course this can be argued as being right – there are the same rules for PL players as for Championship players.   But the norm has been to make allowances lower down the pyramid because basically players in the lower leagues are less skillful.  If one waves cards at every bad tackle as one might do for Premier League players, then half the team could be on cards at the end of each game, which would be ludicrous.

So this is a referee who is coming to terms with the different standards of Premier League and lower league teams.

Which is fine until a match turns up pitching a highly skilled fast moving Premier League team against a League One team with a reputation that one might say is the opposite.  Does he judge each team by Premier League standards or by League One standards, or does he judge each team in a different way?

I fear the latter is going to be the approach.

But let’s move on and round this up with a look at Arsenal  v Bolton across the centuries.  In the first 25 games between the two clubs Arsenal won just two matches.  After 50 games Arsenal had totalled just 10 wins.  But of course things turned around over time and you will not be surprised to know that in the last 13 games between the two, Arsenal won 11, drew one and lost one.

And the difference between the clubs can be seen by a comparison of the current positions of the teams.  Bolton are in the third tier.

 

	Team	P	W	D	L	F	A	GD	Pts
19	Bolton Wanderers	6	2	1	3	7	11	-4	7
4	Arsenal	5	3	2	0	8	3	5	11

 

So what went wrong for the team we used to call Notlob?

Basically they used to get away with an approach to football that was closer to rugby that football as we know it, and we used to hate playing them because of their style and approach was fundamentally physical and the refs let them get away with it, for fear that otherwise they would end up with only half a team on the pitch.

Bolton stayed in the Premier League for 12 years last time around and for most of the time without a single player who could get into double figures when it came to scoring.  Although amazingly Nic Anelka through his long period of “lost” years did play for them for two seasons (it is hard to imagine I know, but he did) and even he couldn’t really turn it on for a team who seemed to think that most of the rules of rugby league applied to association football.    He scored 21 goals in 53 games for them, before having enough and moving on to Chelsea where his goal scoring deserted him.  He was last heard of as a player, playing for Mumbai City.

And should you be interested we las heard of Nic in January this year when he was appointed president of the Turkish club Ümraniyespor.    He resigned in under six months. For Nic it was ever thus.