- Arsenal v Ipswich Town. There have been times when Ipswich has consistenly outplayed Arsenal.
- Has Saka been overplayed or is he just indispensible like other world class players?
By Bulldog Drummond
Referee data for this article comes from WhoScored.
Arsenal’s injury list is not looking that good. Ben White, Bukayo Saka, Raheem Sterling, Takehiro Tomiyasu are all out. Oleksandr Zinchenko maybe in or maybe not.
As for Ipswich they have lost Chiedozie Ogbene, George Hirst, Samy Mekway Said Morsy, Janoi Donacien and Axel Tuanzebe. They are all out for this match.
So Arsenal’s injuries could cause the club a problem, although there is against that the fact that whichever set of statistics we look at, Arsenal have a much better set of stats this season than their opponents.
Take shots per game. Arsenal at home put in twice as many as Ipswich away. Take yellow cards: Ipswich get almost twice as many away as Arsenal at home. Or possession: Arsenal at home get over 46% more possession at home than Ipswich get away. And Arsenal make almost 10% more passes at home than Ipswich do away.
Thus so far this is looking good.
| Team | Shots pg | Yellow Card Total | Possession% | Pass% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arsenal home | 18.5 | 13 | 58.0% | 87.5% |
| Ipswich away | 8.1 | 23 | 39.5% | 79.0% |
But now we have a problem. For the referee for this match is Darren England and this is where we come to a problem. Because Darren England does not do home wins
While some referees see home wins in almost every single game they oversee, others always see away wins and there are even a few that primarily see draws. But sadly for Arsenal this isn’t just a referee that runs games that end as away wins more often than not, this is a free who this season has NEVER overseen a home win. 71.4% of his games are away wins and 28.6% are draws. And PGMO just allow him to continue.
There are two possible explanations as to why Darren England has got this match, therefore. One is because the PGMO are continuing their normal approach to Arsenal, and trying to ensure they don’t win, or else, they are so embarrassed about Mr England’s results that they reckon even he, with his utterly obvious anti-home team bias can’t screw this one up. In short, they are reckoning Arsenal should win no matter what the referee does.
So it could be argued that PGMO is so embarrassed by Mr England’s statistics that they have given him a match that even he couldn’t screw enough to stop it being a home win and thus slightly return his figures toward a more normal array.
But in many ways PGMO does not do normal as these figures show.
| Referee | Apps | HomeWin% | AwayWin% | Draw% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chris Kavanagh | 12 | 8.3 | 25.0 | 66.7 |
| Darren England | 7 | 0.0 | 71.4 | 28.6 |
| Darren Bond | 7 | 85.7 | 0.0 | 14.3 |
Now there have been 170 games played in the Premier League at the time I am writing this (ie before the Boxing Day results come in) and 41% of the games have been home wins, 32% away wins and 28% have been draws.
And yet here we have a referee who has overseen no home wins, 28.6% draws and a staggering 71.4% away wins. Does that seem likely? Or indeed without some sort of bias could that be possible? The answer, surely, is very, very probably not in answer to both questions.
Indeed no other referee comes anywhere near this.
Of course one could say that it is just the way it goes, and that all analyses show up quirky statistics, and he wassn’t like this last year – which actually is true for last season he oversaw 58.3% of his games as being home wins, and only 8.3% away wins. So what brought about the sudden change?
Of course it could be pure chance – he just happened to be given matches last season that had a powerful home team against a week away team. And this season it has gone the other way around, and yes everything can be explained by chance. Which leads one to say that Liverpool are top of the league not because they have a better team than anyone else, and not because referees treat them more leniently than anyone else, but by pure chance.
I don’t buy that. Of course, things do happen by chance, but the reason for looking at a whole array of data is to consider lots of games, and thus the pure chance explanations tend to cancel each other out and an actual trend emerges.
My guess, and it is only that because PGMO are ultrasecretive and won’t answer any questions ever, and indeed don’t even have a website, is that someone told this referee that his bias was too strong last season, and now he has swung the opposite way.
Whatever happened, there is no doubt that for the game against Ipswich, PGMO have done everything they can to try and even things up by appointing a referee who never oversees a home win!
