REF REVIEW 2012: Andre Marriner – competent but liable to the occasional bad day

—————————————————

This article is part of the series : REFEREE REVIEW 2012

Referee reviews this season are published on Referee Decisions.  Ref Review of Arsenal games are also published on Untold Arsenal, as usual.

—————————————————-

By DogFace and Walter Broeckx

Untold Arsenal has a team of qualified referees who have reviewed more than 40% of the EPL games from last season. The reviews themselves were based on full match video footage with the advantage of video technology features such as slow motion and pause.

By reviewing those 155 games we have made a database of more than 7000 decisions that have been judged by our panel of dedicated and qualified referees.

The numbers you will see are based on those decisions and those reviewed games.

The next we are looking at is Andre Marriner. One of the Fifa refs if I’m not mistaken.

Andre Marriner

Can we see this in his numbers?

We managed to review 10 games of this ref last season. That is around 45% of his games. If you might think this is not enough to judge him. Fair but as things are standing right now we might be able to review a bit more games from this ref.

At our new site we have now the certainty of having done all the games of the first two days in the PL this season and if all goes well we should also have all the games of the third day.

But that is the future. Let us now look at last season from this ref and his competency numbers.

Well these are numbers that makes our ref reviewers happy and would make any ref happy I think. A competency score higher than 70% is good and with 75% he is 5% higher than this minimum score.

And when we put weight on it we see that the score only drops with 0.5% so not much difference between the two scores.

Let us have a look at the different type of decisions.

The goal decisions are not really excellent. A bit better than the league average but we do tend to ask a higher score from the refs in the PL. This is the most important type of decisions so should have the highest score.

The offside decisions are better than the league average and come even close to the 99% that Mike Riley once promised over all the league.

The other decisions are also higher than the 70% line so we can just be satisfied with this score.

The penalty decisions are a bit of a downer for me. A score of 56% is something that I would like to see much higher. But compared to the league average it isn’t completely a disaster.

The red cards are much better than the league average but not really what I would like to see from refs in the PL.

The yellow cards are slightly better than the league average.

Let us see if we can find any home/away bias in his numbers?

If we look at the un-weighted numbers we see a score that comes very close to the league average. This is of course not ideal because Mike Riley once said that refs in the PL have no bias. But we found one and even though this seems to be “normal” we still would like to see no bias at all.

If we put weight on the decisions we see the numbers go up a bit. And go a bit higher and further away from the normal bias we found in our reviews. So he had a bit of a pro home teams bias in the games we reviewed. Not extraordinary but still a bit more than we would like to see.

Let us see if we can find any team bias?

Now this is something we don’t like to see of course. A big negative bias against Arsenal. I think a lot can be found in the game Blackburn – Arsenal if I’m not mistaken where he had a bad day at the office costing Arsenal at least one point.   Of course we are used to it but nevertheless something we don’t like to see in our numbers. I also notice a big negative bias in the numbers from Norwich.

The teams on the good end of the bias are Chelsea, Blackburn Rovers, Liverpool and on top we find Wigan.

But to be fair to him 50% of the teams he has done in the games we reviewed have a very marginal bias score in total. So that is a good thing with this ref.

Let us see what happens when we put weight on the decisions.

Well we get the same global picture. The same teams (Arsenal and Norwich) with a too big negative bias score. And the same 4 teams with a high positive bias score.

And in between 6 teams with a rather low bias score in total.

FINAL CONCLUSION

If we look at the competency he is one of the better refs in the PL.

And his home and away bias is there but not very bad compared to other referees.

We see a lot of teams with a very small bias score and that is good  for a ref. However a few bad games resulted in having a high bias score for and against a few teams.

So all in all one of the better referees in the PL but still with a few things we didn’t like in our reviews and hopefully things we will see not again this season.

Please note that referee reviews this season for non-Arsenal games are published on Referee Decisions.  Ref Review of Arsenal games are also published on Untold Arsenal, as usual.

The club that changed football

Making the Arsenal

—————————–

• Man U and Liverpool prepare to out-manoeuvre Chelsea and Man C in a dramatic rule change
• The 31 players in Arsenal’s “25″
• Serge Gnabry – another exciting prospect
• Dejan Iliev makes it four
• Arsenal: the French Connection
• Mark Halsey, simply not good enough
• Arsenal chasing 109 year old record
• The team works, as a team, for each other, all the time.
• Ref Review: Stoke v Arsenal (Lee Mason)