Port Vale’s home and away results, the officials (and what to watch out for)

 

 

 

• Port Vale v Arsenal and a memorable bit of giant killing
• Arsenal are bottlers and referees have no idea what they are doing

By Tony Attwood

Andrew Kitchen is set to referee the match tonight, assisted by Shaun Hudson and Sam Lewis. The fourth official will be Andrew Humphries. VAR will not be in operation for any matches in the third round of the League Cup.  I guess they are trying to save on electricity.

As far as I can tell, Mr Kitchen has only ever overseen two Premier League matches, both in 2023/24.  Again, as far as I can see, he got no league games last season (we obviously don’t know why) but now he is back overseeing Arsenal tonight.  Here we compare his figures with those of two regular Premier League referees.

And I make this comparison because there is a problem with a referee who oversees matches in the lower leagues suddenly overseeing a match with Premier League players involved.  Plus there is no logical pattern here.  He gets two games one season, then nothing, and now a League Cup match.  One may reasonably ask, why is there not a more consistent progression?   But then one thnks, oh this is PGMO.  There’s the answer.

The problem is that Premier League referees are stricter than lower league referees.  The refs in the lower leagues allow for the lower level of skill of the players, and so to avoid there being several players sent off in each match, they tend to use the wagging finger as the first action for several dubious challenges, followed by the word spoken to the player and only after both those if the player continues fouling multiple times or in a singularly reckless way is the card brought out as a last resort.

Thus, referees and players in the lower leagues get away with more – and the reason given for this is that they tend to be less skilful, and if the Premier League standards were imposed on lower league players the games would end up eight-a-side affairs.

Which is all very well until we get to a game such as tonight’s match, where we have players who are educated into the ways of PGMO officials in the top league, and then find themselves being cut to bits by players who play in a lower league and who are used to getting away with that sort of thing.

We don’t keep close tabs on referees working in the lower leagues, but Andrew Kitchen has overseen two Premier League games and here are his figures, compared with a couple of the regulars. 

These figures are from 2023/24.   And for some reason, Mr Kitchen didn’t do any PL games last season.  We could now add a silly joke about why he didn’t have time, drawing on his surname, but I’ll leave you to think that up for yourself.

 

Referee	PL Games	Fouls pg	Yel pg
Anthony Taylor	27	21.26	2.87
Simon Hooper	25	19.96	4.67
Andrew Kitchen	2	27.00	2.00

 

Of course, there are multiple problems that can arise.  The referee can be very excited about handing out fouls and cards because he knows he is being watched for possible promotioin to the PL list, or he could alredy be using PL standards in Championship and League One games, which can mean he is seeing many tackles in the lower leagues as fouls, which are indeed fouls, but which are not normally given in that lower division because of the lower swtandard of the players.

Referees do need to make their way up through the ranks, but this approach of the occasional job here and there, and the fact that standards in the lower leagues are very different from the Premier League, makes this all very difficult.

Moving on to the team, Port Vale had a terrible start to the season and indeed have only scored eight goals this season.  They started the season with a run of seven league games in which they won none, drew two and lost the rest.  By 12 September their league position was one from the bottom.

 

We’ll have a final round up with some thoughts on the team shortly.