Ref review 2012/13: Kevin Friend. Over 90% right, but a red card disaster.

By Walter Broeckx

This article is part of the series of the Referee Review 2013. You can find links to earlier articles on the bottom of this article.

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For the next ref in our series we have ref Kevin Friend. Kevin Friend came in to the PL in 2009 and has now a few seasons of experience under his belt. He is 42 years old now and in normal circumstances we will be seeing him for a few years.

In the season just gone Friend did 24 games in the PL and we reviewed 12 of his games. That is 50.00% of his games we have been able to cover. So unless he did the complete opposite in those 12 other games that we couldn’t review I think we can draw some conclusions about this ref with the numbers we gathered last season. So let us first have a look at his overall decisions.

In the 12 games we reviewed ref Friend had to make 1673 decisions. Our panel of referee reviewers judged that he had 1509 correct decisions and that is 90,20% of correct decisions in total. Just as with ref Moss this is an excellent number. So just as with Moss I think the referee should  take a bow for these numbers.

Of course by now you know that judging them as correct is not the same as being correct completely. When we can’t judge a call or when we are not 100% sure he made a mistake we call the decision correct. But it might be that if we had seen other angles we might have seen an incorrect decision.  So in general the numbers could be even flattering the refs but this goes for all the refs and not the refs we are looking at today.

But this remark shouldn’t take anything away from his numbers.  For all the refs had the same treatment it will show you that some refs performed better than others. And I think we can say that Friend just like Moss was one of the top performers in the PL.

He also is a rather low profile ref I think and most people will not know him that well. And that is usually a good sign for a ref. It shows that in general his decisions are being approved by the public and he didn’t became famous with serious mistakes. Now let us look at the important decisions.

When we look at his important decisions we see that his number just drops below the 80% mark.

In this set of numbers we see one stand out number. And it is a negative number. We see that he got all his red card decisions wrong. And that is a real shame if you ask me and throws a big shadow over what looks a great set of numbers for the rest.  It seems that he has some troubles with sending off players with a red card. Or handing out a second yellow card. He only got half of those decisions right.

His first yellow cards are good compared to others but I would like to see a higher number if possible. He has been criticised in recent years about not handing them out well and this might be his Achilles heel in his refereeing.

What is good is that his general foul/free kick numbers are above 80% and that is great. Not many refs in the PL get such a score. Which is bad for the PL.

And also his penalty decisions were far better than most refs in the PL. A score close to 80% is showing that there is not much difference between ref Friend inside our outside the penalty box.

And his goal decisions were also great apart from one decision where he made a mistake.

So a great set of numbers with almost in every aspect a better score than most other refs in the PL.  Kevin Friend can be a satisfied ref and if he could work on the cards he could become even better.

Will we still be satisfied when we see the bias numbers? Let us check them.

 

If we look at these numbers we see that most teams had a negative bias and only a few with a positive bias. Manchester United is leading the way in the positive bias numbers closely followed by Liverpool. Not the most likely combination one could say but these are the numbers. Tottenham also had a fine bias going their way.  Stoke had a small bias in their favour and Southampton can be the team that said it evened out when Friend as the ref.

We note that Friend was rather kind to Arsenal with the smallest negative bias for Arsenal compared to the other teams.  Chelsea also had a small negative bias. Sunderland, Everton and Reading got a bit more against them.

Fulham and WBA have more reasons to complain. And I don’t know what went wrong when Friend did Aston Villa but the bias is amazingly big against them. For a ref who has a lot of teams with a small bias score this numbers looks totally out of place.  He sure must have a real bad day at the office in that game and Aston Villa seemed to have paid the price.

FINAL CONCLUSION: A great set of numbers with only a few remarks we can give. He should improve on giving his cards and that is the only negative remark I can give. For the rest outstanding numbers and showing a lot of his big named- colleagues how to do it. And rather low bias scores in general apart from the rather strange looking Aston Villa number. He sure wasn’t the friend of Aston Villa last season in the games we reviewed.

• 1. Who reviewed the games
• 2. What we did and what next
• 3. All the decisions in numbers
• 4. The first, at times astonishing, numbers
• 5. Home and away bias
• 6.  It all evens out in the end – Wigan last season
• 7.  West Ham: Life with a positive bias
• 8.  West Brom and the Referees
• 9.  Tottenham, penalties and some amusing comments
• 10.  Swansea City and a change this year
• 11.  Sunderland, a positive bias
• 12.  Stoke, where refereeing is different.
• 13.  Southampton – how did they ever survive?
• 14.  QPR – a strange case
• 15.  Norwich – more errors than acceptable
• 16.  Newcastle United – again, more errors than there should be.
• 17.  Manchester United: 70% of wrong decisions in their favour. 
• 18.  Manchester City: unlike their neighbours a very small bias.
• 19: Liverpool: you should blame the refs
• 20: Fulham – it all evens out in the end
• 21: Everton: a slight bias in favour
• 22: Chelsea: an occasional bias against
• 23: Aston Villa: a huge bias in favour
• 24: Refs give opposition freedom to kick Arsenal off the park.
• 25. The complete league bias table
• 26. Untold has said it for a long while, others follow
• 27. Andre Marriner; a good ref but 10% of his goal decisions are wrong!
• 28: Anthony Taylor: Disastrous when it comes to penalties
• 29.  Chris Foy: Very bad on cards and fouls
• 30.  Howard Webb, an amazing score
• 31: Jonathon Moss: Over 90% right.
• 32: Lee Mason, the ref with penalty area fever
• 33: Kevin Friend.