- Crystal Palace concede more than they score, but still manage to beat Arsenal
- The League Cup: where Arsenal usually get it wrong, and why they won’t this time
- Palace, like Everton, are focused on defence which tells us how the League Cup game will go
By Bulldog Drummond
The referee for tonight’s game against Crystal Palace is Andrew Madley. This will cause considerable trepidation for Arsenal and give Palace a lot of hope as the last time he turned up at Arsenal for a match it was a game against Brighton in which Arsenal lost 0-3 at home. That was in May last year.
One thing we should notice here however is that there will be no VAR since not all Football League clubs have VAR facilities at their grounds. So the rule is no VAR even when both teams playing actually have the facility. As they say, it’s a funny ol’ game.
But now let us consider Andy Madley. Using data supplied by WhoScored as usual, this season he has been something of a foul-giver, giving out 25.5 fouls on average per game. By comparison, we might note Anthony Taylor who gives 21.57 fouls per game on average. That means Madley sees 18% more fouls than Taylor. Not that there are 18% more – he just sees 18% more.
And to be clear that is not just in one game. That is the average across all the games.
As for yellow cards Mr Madley gives out 29% more yellow cards on average per game compared with Anthony Tayor. He’s on 5.17 yellow cards per game.
Now since Palace are getting 18% more yellow cards than Arsenal this season, that could work in Arsenal’s favour. Especially as Palace this season have received 40% more cards for fouls than Arsenal. And in passing we might note that despite all the fanatical excitement from the media over Arsenal’s three early red cards, taking this season as a whole, Arsenal have this season only received 20 yellow cards for fouls. Only Everton and Brentford have fewer.
But back to the referee. On average, he gives 19% more fouls against the away team than the home team – which obviously acts in Arsenal’s favour. And he gives 7% more yellow cards to the away team. Today Arsenal can expect around 12 fouls given against them and two or three yellow cards.
As for Referee Madley’s position on home and away teams, Mr Madley is very much a home-win referee which again obviously helps Arsenal. In that just over two-thirds of the games he has seen in the Premier League this season have been home wins. The rest have been equally distributed between away wins and draws.
And here we might compare Andy Madley’s numbers with Chris Kavanagh who in 11 games has seen almost two things of them as draws. Or maybe Darren Engalnd, who in seven games this season has not overseen a single home win but instead has overseen two-thirds of his matches as away wins.
Of course we can expect some variation between referees, but these numbers are utterly crazy – and we find oddities in the referee statistics like this every week! There is indeed something odd going on – and that is before we consider the fact that the media in general won’t even mention referees in this way.
Yet if we look at the referees who have overseen ten or more Premier League games this season we find that Samuel Barrott has taken control of 60% of his games as home wins, while for Michael Oliver only 30.8% of his 13 games have been home wins. There can really be no doubt at all that which referee a club gets has quite an impact on the result of the game.
And what is doubly frustrating is that all these figures are freely available on the internet (see the link above) and yet very few people are pointing to the fact that one of the major influences on club results is which referee the club gets.
But let’s finish with a broader perspective. Overall this is the third-best team in the Premier League at home to the 15th-best team in the Premier League. Palace are four points above relegation and Arsenal are six points off the top. Both clubs have got other things to think about.
