By Tony Attwood
- Brighton v Arsenal: the games between the two clubs and recent form
- Wednesday at 7.30: Brighton v Arsenal. How the clubs are doing of late
The match will be refereed by Chris Kavanagh, with Dan Cook and Ian Hussin assisting him. The fourth official will be David Webb. Michael Salisbury will be on VAR, with Sian Massey-Ellis as the assistant VAR.
Kavanagh was recently stood down from Premier League officiating after making a number of clear errors in Aston Villa’s FA Cup match against Newcastle United. But of course, because PGMO refuses to employ enough referees to implement the simplest of anti-corruption measures (that no referee should oversee any team more than twice n a season), here he is again.
But Kavanagh returned to the Premier League with the match between Manchester United and Crystal Palace this weekend, and he’ll now referee Arsenal’s game in midweek, despite being the third most-used referee in the league this season.
This will be his 21st league game of the campaign. This ref is one of four who have already overseen 20+ Premier League games this season, and of those four referees, he is the one who perceives the most fouls per game (22.55).
This level of fouls is 12% more than that of Anthony Taylor, the most-used league referee this season. Kavanagh is also the top referee when it comes to seeing a tackle as a foul, as just over two-thirds of the tackles he watches are then blown as fouls. None of the other regularly used referees can catch him in the ability to perceive fouls where others would not.
He hands out 3.8 yellow cards a game, which is around the same level as Anthony Taylor but over a third more than Michael Oliver, so any players worried about getting into the suspension list need to take care.
But he has only handed out two red cards in his 20 games, which puts him mid-table in that regard. This suggests that, having waved his cards early on, he then backs off a bit for the rest of the match, and Arsenal will need to be wary of some flying tackles in the last quarter of the game.
Now Brighton are third in the “fouls per game” league this season, while Arsenal are 14th, so it is more likely that any card waving in the match tonight will be against Brighton players, despite the referee’s home bias, and the Arsenal team should come through the match relatively unscathed in terms of referee actions.
This season, the most fouling teams according to Statmuse are Wolverhampton, Bournemouth, Brighton and Tottenham in that order. Brighton are recorded as committing 12.04 fouls per match while Arsenal commit 10.1, so Brighton commit 19% more fouls than Arsenal, according to referees. Tottenham, we might note, are on 11.5 fouls per match, the fourth highest in the league.
As for the results, Chris Kavanagh, has seen 50% home wins in his 20 league games this season. This is not the highest in the league (!) but alarming when we compare his data with, for example, Stuart Attwell, who after 18 league games, has overseen just 33.3% home wins.
Meanwhile, only 25% of Kavanagh’s games end in away wins, compared for example, with 41.2% for Craig Pawson and 56.3% for Jarred Gillett.
So yet again, we can see that the result can be as much determined by which referee the clubs get as by how they perform. Worse, as we showed during and after the pandemic, referees are strongly influenced by the crowd.
During the pandemic, with no crowds in the grounds, the number of away wins shot up, as referees did not feel the ire of local supporters. But with crowds, clubs playing away have to play twice as hard to win. This has nothing to do with clubs being unfamiliar with the grounds they are playing on, or the negative influence of the home crowd on the away players – it is down to the influence of the home crowd on the referee as those statistics show.
Some referees can withstand the home crowd pressure, but unfortunately, Kavanagh is 14th in the list when it comes to this attribute. And indeed more than anything else, that statistical finding (which we highlighted regularly during the pandemic, but which was, as far as I know, never mentioned then or since in the media) that shapes the league table.
So this referee sees twice as many home wins as away wins, and Arsenal will have to be aware of this as they enter the game. But we can be consoled that this season, Arsenal have fully understood such issues and have won 53% of their away games, while Brighton have won just 43% of their home games. That 10% difference could be the edge that helps Arsenal get another away win – it would be their ninth in 16 away games this season.
