Arsenal v Leeds. This referee does not like home wins.

 

 

By Tony Attwood

• Arsenal v Leeds: how the two teams have been faring
• The issue of the referee who is against a specific club

In a statement after his latest disaster, Thomas Frank said he doesn’t want players at his little club who are not committed to the Tottenham “fantastic badge.”   So he never wanted Eze anyway.

But we might ask what the badge actually symbolises?  It is of course, cock fighting, the sport of Harry Hotspur who owned much of Tottenham, Middlesex, in the Middle Ages.   I suppose they think that is a good tradition.  Personally, I’d rather celebrate the men who worked to achieve victory for the UK armed services, but each to their own.

Tottenham have gained a couple of league titles, the last of which was sixty-four years ago, so maybe the badge now signifies historians.   Or maybe it symbolises the FA Cup wins, the last of which was 34 years ago.   

But no, let’s be fair, Tottenham did win the Europa League last season which Arsenal haven’t done, largely because they haven’t been in it much – preferring the Champions League by and large, which I seem to remember we got to the semi-finals of only to be defeated by the Qatar Investment Authority.

And now Tottenham find that having reached an agreement with Crystal Palace for the transfer of Eze, when he came to look at what Tottenham have done, and how they are playing, he got a taxi two miles down the road and signed there instead.  Even the Guardian said, “If it is a coup for Arsenal and a dream move for Eze, who supported the club as a boy, it has been an episode Spurs would rather forget. They failed in a bid for Nottingham Forest’s Morgan Gibbs-White in July and are without their two main central attacking midfielders, Dejan Kulusski and James Maddison. Both have long-term injuries.”   Oh dear.  

The problem for Tottenham of course, is that their manager’s statement that, “I don’t want players that don’t want to come to the club,’ is nonsense since players are able to say what they want to do, and can refuse a transfer if they wish.  So it is the other way around.  Players really don’t want to go to Tottenham when something better is on offer.  And this I think is the fundamental failure of Tottenham’s thinking: they continue to see players as cattle that can be bought and sold – but actually they are people with brains.  And agents.  

Anyway, today we play Leeds and the referee is Jarred Gillett.   The figures below are from last season, as obviously the refs haven’t overseen enough this campaign to give us reliable data.  And once again, you can see the range of approaches there are between referees.   These are all referees making 16+ appearances last campaign, and their fouls per game range by 12.5% between the least foul-aware referee and the most foul-aware referee.   Maybe that is a bit more than ideal, but it is not too bad.

And yet the range in the number of yellow cards per game is 68%.    Yes Brooks has waved 68% more cards per game than Madley.   Yet they have seen virtually identical numbers of fouls.

Referee	Gam,es	Fouls pg	Yel pg
4.Robert Jones	22	24.82	4.23
10.Andy Madley	20	22.75	3.65
11.John Brooks	16	22.63	5.38
15.Jarred Gillett	16	22.06	4.25

 

How can that possibly be excusable or right in any way?   These referees see almost the same number of fouls, and yet one gives out over 68% more cards than another.  It is utter nonsense, and means of course that intelligent managers will tell their players to change their style of play according to the ref – not to play to the laws of the game.

But now, on top of that, we have a really big problem – the results they get.

If referees are picked without reference to the sides they are overseeing, we would expect the percentage of home wins, away wins and draws to be roughly similar between referees. 

But home wins for specific referees range from 40.9% to 68.8%.   Away wins range from 12.5% to 47.8%.  Draws from 8.7% to 30%.   You can indeed make a good bet on the result by knowing which referee is in control

Referee	Games	HomeWin%	AwayWin%	Draw%
.John Brooks	16	68.8	12.5	18.8
Thomas Bramall	11	63.6	27.3	9.1
Darren Bond	14	57.1	14.3	28.6
Peter Bankes	23	56.5	34.8	8.7
Simon Hooper	24	50.0	25.0	25.0
Michael Salisbury	13	46.2	46.2	7.7
Andy Madley	20	45.0	25.0	30.0
Samuel Barrott	23	43.5	47.8	8.7
Craig Pawson	22	40.9	31.8	27.3
Tony Harrington	18	38.9	44.4	16.7
Jarred Gillett	16	37.5	50.0	12.5
Darren England	20	35.0	45.0	20.0
Chris Kavanagh	25	32.0	24.0	44.0
Michael Oliver	26	30.8	38.5	30.8

 

And so what do we find?  Gillett, who referees our game today has the highest percentage of away wins of the main referees.

You may, of course, think that is a mere coincidence.  But given events of the last few seasons, I would suggest perhaps not.