RefWatch – Arsenal Vs Bolton Wanderers (23/09/2011 – 15.00)

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By DogFace

• Referee: Mark Clattenburg
• Assistant 1: Simon Beck
• Assistant 2: Stephen Child
• 4th Official: Andy D’Urso

Good morning stat-fans and welcome to RefWatch! You’ll be pleased to know that I’ve ironed out a few kinks in the graphs with regards to the span of seasonal data and the comparative line widths on the booking index visuals. I’m still trying to find a happy medium with regards to the representative widths of the lines on FPB/BBM/AHS/PPG graphs as I think they may be, like Phil Dowd, a bit fat (or the booking index too thin) – but I’ll find an intuitive visual medium in subsequent evolutions; but at least now we are firmly in ‘beta’ release territory and I am pleased to lay these figures at your feet… so please tread carefully.

Let’s have a look at the Referee:

• Full name: Mark Clattenburg
• Date of birth: 13-Mar-1975 (Age 36)
• Place of birth: Consett, County Durham
• Resides: Tyne & Wear
• EPL Referee Since: 2004/2005
• EPL Games to date: 143

Hair today – gone tomorrow… oh wait?!

It’s Mark Clattenburg again… you remember him; he used to have a bald patch and he’s the one that turned a blind eye when Wayne Roony got all in a ‘rage’ and ran up to James McCarthy to perform a flying elbow in the back of his head. Although Walter seems to rate him so I won’t go into all that business about his 2008 ‘suspension’ [nothing official] for this.

So… let’s check out his stats!

Mark Clattenburg has had 17 games for Arsenal consisting of 11 wins, 1 draw and 5 losses.

Arsenal are currently in 3rd in Mark Clattenburg’s personal Points Per Game League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, with an average of 2.00 PPG.

In Mark Clattenburg’s personal Handicap Swing League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, Arsenal come 1st with an average positive swing of 0.97.

Arsenal are currently in 12th in Mark Clattenburg’s personal Booking’s Per Match League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, with an overall average of 1.71 BPM.

In Mark Clattenburg’s personal Fouls Per Booking League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, Arsenal come 16th with an overall average of 6.10 FPB.

As we can see from the graph [above] last season we saw a change in fortunes under Mark in that, on average, we over performed against the handicap [blue rising line] and this was reflected in our average points per game [getting thicker]. Interestingly this runs counter intuitive to our FPB/BPM figures [falling red line getting thicker] in that we were seemingly booked more and for less fouls against that of our opponents [rising orange line] – this could indicate that we saw a more flowing game under Mark where he didn’t allow the opposition to gain territory through a succession of trivial incidents/dives resulting in free kicks. I cannot, of course, confirm this theory until we get enough good data from the Untold RefReview project – and my many thanks go to Chowdhury, Walter and all the Untold Researchers for their input into that.

If we look now to our booking index we can see that our defence and midfield are booked fairly consistently over the seasons with a trend towards more frequent and slightly earlier bookings. Last season saw Mark card our attack a few times too.

Interestingly we can see some consistency in the way Mark officiated our opposition last season and we have seen a distinct trend over the seasons to more and earlier bookings in the defence, midfield and attack. This would indicate an approach to clamp down on over physical play (in last season in particular).

Let’s move on now to see how Bolton Wanderers fair under the whistle of Mark Clattenburg:

Mark Clattenburg has had 24 games for Bolton Wanderers consisting of 9 wins, 8 draws and 7 losses.

Bolton Wanderers are currently in 9th in Mark Clattenburg’s personal Points Per Game League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, with an average of 1.46 PPG.

In Mark Clattenburg’s personal Handicap Swing League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, Bolton Wanderers come 11th with an average negative swing of -0.04.

Bolton Wanderers are currently in 17th in Mark Clattenburg’s personal Booking’s Per Match League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, with an overall average of 2.04 BPM.

In Mark Clattenburg’s personal Fouls Per Booking League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the English Premier, Bolton Wanderers come 17th with an overall average of 5.84 FPB.

The most striking thing about the above graph is the 2008/2009 season in which Bolton and their opponents received no bookings for the fouls they committed – this can be explained (in a way) in that Mark only had one game, I think, that season between Bolton and Manchester City in which Bolton lost. Bolton’s performances under Mark have improved slightly over the last few seasons since the 2008/2009 game although we can see that they are being punished more in the tackle and trending to more bookings for less fouls.

What also strikes me looking at this data is that there seem to be two Mark Clattenburg’s – the one prior to the ‘incident’ in the 2008/2009 season and the one post… I much prefer the latter.

Bolton’s booking index is as much as I expected from reviewing the previous graphs – Bolton’s midfield are getting consistently booked around the halfway mark and this pattern has spread to their defence over the last few seasons. Bolton’s strikers have also been fairly consistently booked, on average, around the half way mark but not so frequently as the midfield and attack.

We knew that Bolton’s opposition received fewer bookings than Bolton under Clattenburg from the first graph in this breakdown and now we can see how this has come about – with the booking’s to the strikers and substitutes dropping off we can also see a trend to fewer and later bookings, on average, to the midfield. The defence of Bolton’s opposition under Clattenburg, on the other hand, got booked more on average last season.

Let’s move on now to check out how Mark Clattenburg performs against selected teams in the EPL:

As we can see from the graph Arsenal [blue] and Bolton [orange] are both on the rise under Mark Clattenburg – although Arsenal more so as you might expect.

A quick note here on some of the peculiarities of this graph – you can see in the 2008/2009 season all selected teams other than Manchester City [grey] and Bolton Wanderers [orange] intersect the zero point on the vertical axis – this is because Mark’s ‘incident’ happened at the start of that season and, as previously mentioned, the City and Bolton game was his only one – therefore zero represents a neutral performance. This can also be seen in this season, excluding Liverpool [purple] and Manchester City [grey] in which he has officiated matches.

By far the biggest turn in performance over the seasons looks to be that of Manchester United [dark blue] and Chelsea [red] whose lines have trended higher and thicker from very poor results in the 2007/2008 season.

The Predictortron gives Arsenal a 3.464286 goal advantage… and I reckon if the crowd can get behind the team and inspire the confidence we need to put games like this to bed we’ll take all 3 points.

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