- Arsenal v Brighton tomorrow at 3pm, fitness, fouls and cards
- What Arsenal players did at Great Ormond Street hospital
- When they forget Arsenal are top of TWO leagues
By Tony Attwood
So here’s the lineup for today’s game at 3pm (wat an odd time) with nothing being shown on TV…..
Referee: John Brooks
Assistants: Simon Bennett and Craig Taylor
Fourth official: Ruebyn Ricardo
VAR: Paul Tierney
Assistant VAR: Nick Hopton
John Brooks has hardly covered himself in sweat this season in the Premier League as he has only taken on five games. Of course, because PGMO is a fanatically secretive organisation (the sort of body that makes the Knights Templar and the Freemasons look like Come-All-Ye parties), we don’t know why he has not bee running about a bit on Premier League turfs. Has he been injured? Or sent for re-training? Or on holiday?
Whatever the cause here he is on just five PL games this campaign. Of these 60% have been home wins, 20% (ie 1) have been an away win, and one a draw.
So with such a paucity of information, I thought we ought to have a look at last year
| Games | Fouls pg | Yel pg |
|---|---|---|
| John Brooks 24/5 | 22.68 | 5.38 |
| John Brooks 25/26 | 23.2 | 3.2 |
So we can see that this year he is down to 3.2 yellow cards per game, which means he is running at 62% of last season’s total. Now why is that?
Such figures certainly show us clearly that yellow cards are not given out by referees in accordance with strict regulation, but either on refereeing whims or sudden changes in diktar from on hight. And indeed if those whims from on high get out of control, the referee can be taken aside, given a talking to and then sent out again to see what he gets up to this time around. But really, PL refs should not be told “Give out more cards or you are out!” or whatever instructions follow a review of statistics.
And who suffers from this crazed approach? Obviously, players and we fans are trying to make sense of and enjoy a game of football in the face of manic variations. (Certainly not the media for whom the whole issue of different refereeing approaches is just a blur).
And from this small amount of data, we can see what was going on. Last season Brooks was right out there in card waving, way above any other referee who oversaw ten games or more in the Premier League with 5.38 yellows a game after seeing 22.68 fouls per game. No other referee came near to this.
But now all has changed, and this season his actual number of fouls per game has gone up – although only a little just by 2% while his yellows have gone down! Which is enough to show us that the authorities at PGMO didn’t tell him off for seeing fouls. But his yellow card rate of 5.38 per game was off the chart when compared with other referees who had seen 15 games or more.
With such a Jekyll and Hyde change in the refereeing performances of this referee, it is hard to know quite what we will get. And this is where this semi-skimmmed approach to refereeing, in which a ref can one season be letting everything go and another season be handing out cards like they are playing whist, leads to chaos.
So let us have a look at this season and the teams….
| Team | Goals | Yellow | Red | Possession% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Tottenham | 26 | 44 | 2 | 51.8 |
| 2. Bournemouth | 26 | 42 | 1 | 52.6 |
| 3. Brighton | 25 | 41 | 0 | 51.9 |
| 20. Arsenal | 31 | 22 | 0 | 59.8 |
So Arsenal are on half the number of yellow cards as Brighton, neither team has done a Tottenham and had even one plyaer sent off, and both Brighton and Arsenal like to have possession bu Arsenal have quite a bit more of it. In fact, only Liverpool on just over 60%, have more possession than Arsenal.
And since we have already seen that Arsenal have a much better home record than Brighton has an away record, we might hope for a solid win.
We can also look at John Brooks this season. In terms of home wins, over two-thirds of Brooks’ games last season fell into this group. And we might compare that with Robert Jones who had only 18% of his games end up as home wins. Brooks doesn’t like away wins, seeing just 12.5% of his games went that way. And while we might note Chris Kavanagh loves draws (44% of his games this season have been draws) Brooks only saw them in under 19% of games last campaign. So for once we might hope that the ref is true to his nature.
