- Arsenal v Chelsea: was Chelsea worth all the money?
- Arsenal v Chelsea: a game where home advantage really ought to count
By Tony Attwood
Darren England is the referee for the Chelsea game. In terms of fouls, the top referees are running between 19.93 per game (Gillett) and 23.33 per game (Hooper). Hooper sees 18% more fouls than Gillet.
Fouls per tackle range from 0.69 per game for England to 0.52 to for Gillett. This referee sees 32% more fouls per tackle than Gillett.
Our referee waves 3,88 yellows per game. The range is between 4.56 for Attwell, and 2.44 for Pawson. So Attwell is showing virtually double the number of yellows that Pawson does. Our referee is mid-range.
The range figures show the nonsense of the refereeing at present. One ref sees 18% more fouls than another in each game. One ref see 32% more fouls from tackles than another. And one ref waves 86% more yellow cards than another. Truly, how well a club does depends on which referee the club gets on each occasion.
All this does of course affect the result
In his games this season Darren England has seen 43.8% of his games as home wins, 35.5% of his games as away wins and 18.8% as draws
We might be permitted a bit of sadness that we don’t have Peter Bankes as referee as he has seen 73.6% of his games as home wins and only 15.8% as away wins.
These figures show not only how variable referees are in the handling of games, but how much power PGMO has to influence a game according to which referee they choose for a game. And indeed, we might reflect once again on the fact that we have already shown the refereeing situation is getting out of hand.
You might recall that forthe Wolverhampton game, we had to delay the regular pre-match article because of yet more shenanigans by PGMO.
We were already on the lookout for dubious doings by PGMO as against Brentford, we had already seen a very late, almost last-minute, change in a referee for an Arsenal game. That event involved the removal of a referee who was shown in our pre-match preview to favour away teams, with him being replaced by a referee who most certainly did not have this attribute…
The problem is of course, that with PGMO’s referees’ list, we can see one referee sees 50% away wins, while another only oversees 5% away wins. The PGMO persistently ignore this outrage, and the media refuse to note the clear facts of the case, which we have become used to. But then, suddenly, for one match, PGMO implemented a last-minute change of ref after we highlighted the originally nominated man’s figures, which appeared (because of a high percentage of away wins) to be in Arsenal’s favour?
We will of course, never know, but we are now on the lookout for a repeat performance by PGMO. And of course, we also ask, should we stop doing referee previews? So we’ve had the debate and decided no, we keep going, just to see if it happens again. I know it might harm Arsenal, but the club is surely aware of the bias of each referee before each match and is preparing the players for it.
England as a referee is pretty much mid-table for all major issues such as fouls, fouls per tackle and yellow cards. So is it pure chance that this time, having been thrown under the gaze of a rather whacky whistler for the Brentford game, the PGMO realised we spotted what they have done, and they are starting to give Arsenal more moderate, more middle-of-the-road referees?
Of course, because PGMO is an utterly secret organisation that never reveals anything of its workings (not even when it replaces a referee right at the last moment, and makes sure that Arsenal are overseen a referee whose approach is very much to Arsenal’s disadvantage) we really don’t know.
Referees should not be so varied in their approach. It is ludicrous that one referee can regularly be handing out twice as many yellows per game as another. But if our constant attention to these details has finally made PGMO recognise that we are looking at them, and we will highlight the insanities of the variations in the way their employees work, then we will at least have done something good with our time.
So now here we are showing that
