- Arsenal v Aston Villa: there’s something very odd about this fixture list
- What is really wrong with Premier League refereeing? We decided to find out
Latest from the Arsenal History Society:
By Tony Attwood
There is a lot more about referees on the new website Untold Referees. Here, however, is our normal Untold Arsenal pre-match referee review
Peter Bankes is the referee, and as usual, we have here a table of referees showing their figures per game for this season. These figures are per game although the fouls per tackle figure is slightly different – a referee who saw a foul with every tackle would get a score of 1.0 so a figure of 0.54 as Anthony Taylor has, suggests that just over half the tackles he sees are fouls. Peter Bankes’ figure of 0.74, however, shows that three-quarters of the tackles he sees are given by him as fouls, which might not sound much, but actually is an enormous difference. In the table, exceptional figures (either more than other refs, or fewer than all other regular refs) are in bold.
The variation row at the end shows how much bigger in percentage terms the referee with the highest average number for that event is than the referee with the lowest number.
Thus in terms of yellow cards, Barrott gives out 4.75 cards a game on average, while Oliver gives out 2.36 cards per game on average. So we can see that Barrott gives out just about twice as many cards as Oliver, so Barrott is giving out 101% the number of cards as Oliver.
| Referee | Ganes | Fouls pg | Fouls/Tackle | Pen pg | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Michael Oliver | 11 | 21.91 | 0.64 | 0.09 | 2.36 |
| Anthony Taylor | 11 | 19.36 | 0.54 | 0.18 | 3.45 |
| Chris Kavanagh | 11 | 23.18 | 0.71 | 0.45 | 3.91 |
| Peter Bankes | 10 | 24.60 | 0.74 | 0.40 | 4.20 |
| Simon Hooper | 8 | 25.13 | 0.68 | 0.13 | 4.75 |
| Samuel Barrott | 8 | 21.38 | 0.64 | 0.50 | 4.75 |
| Tony Harrington | 7 | 19.29 | 0.59 | 0.14 | 3.00 |
| Variation | 30% | 37% | 400% | 101% |
Now the point about this is that these are all professional referees, and yet their decision-making, averaged over a fair number of games in the Premier League, are massively different from each other. So, unless PGMOL want to come out and tell us that they deliberately give Hooper games in which they know there are going to be lots of fouls, while Oliver is ALWAYS given games between clubs that don’t do dodgy fouls or handballs in the penalty area, we know there is no effective consistency training given to PL referees.
That of course, is utterly ridiculous, but if that is not the case, and I am sure it is not, we are left with the situation in which Barrott and Oliver are seeing similar games on average, but one of them is handing out twice as many yellows as the other. And PGMO are doing NOTHING about it, such as sending one of the two for extensive re-training.
The implication of this has to be that managers, if they have any sense, will be telling their players to adjust their performance on the basis of which referee they have. As a result, the referee is determining what sort of game we see – which again is most certainly not how it should be.
But there is something else that is weird. How can ALL – and I really do mean ALL – of the professional referees go on behaving like this without coming clean and telling us? And how come none of the TV, radio or newspaper reporters ever mentions this massive variation?
In the latter case, the only explanations I can think of are that either the reporters are spending far too much time in the clubs’ hospitality rooms, or they are not watching the game. Or maybe, to give a conspiracy twist to the affair, they have been told not to mention this disparity between refereeing performances in order to “avoid bringing the game into disrepute”. And worse, they have agreed with that “request”.
So which is it? Are the refs simply not caring because until now, no one has noticed the disparity between them as they dish out the cards and blow for fouls, or is it that the media has been told not to talk about the referees on pain of having their media passes removed?
Or could it just be that the reporters spend so long in club hospitality rooms that they don’t even notice?
Of course I am a blogger, not a professional scribbler on football for a newspaper, so I don’t have the priviledge of sitting in the specially designed media chairs at Arsenal stadium, with the desk in front and the phone by my side, but it would be awfully nice if the media invited a regular supporter to sit among them so he or she could see exactly what they get up to.
Although actually, many years ago I did actually have a chance to do something like this, but in a much lower division match, and what sticks in my memory from that occasion was that after a goal was scored from a melee in which it was not clear who got the final touch, the journalists all turned to each other, quickly had a chat, and came up with their united view on who it was that scored. No matter whether that was the truth or not, all of them would write up or broadcast the same thing, so that would become reality.
Of course, these days with slow-motion replays of everything, there is far less doubt about who did what, at least in the top leagues, but I mention the collusion from days past because in effect, we still have that over the issue of referee mistakes. There is a universal agreement that these never, ever get mentioned and never focused on in video replays.
And once again, I wonder who it is that insists on that.
