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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After having dealt with the different teams and after having examined all the refs and this leading to the best ref of the season according to the views of our referee reviewers we now will bring you something that will be an easy manual to see who is good or bad for a team.
We bring you this so that from now on if you see that a particular team is playing with a particular ref in charge you can see in a blink of an eye if this ref has a bad or a good history with that team. At least in the season 2012/2013. And if all goes well we will even try to add the bias from the season before in to each article. And that way you can see possible recurrent events.
The point is that some referee performances can be a one off. But if a ref has the same bias against a team over time it might show something more. If a ref of course has a big bias in favour of a team it also is saying something about that ref.
A little word of explanation about the graphics you will see. The ultimate referee performance, if ever achieved, would show a bias score (which is based on the wrong decisions) of around zero. Alas you will find very few such scores in the total series but one can always hope. The zero line will be the middle line of each graphic.
If a ref has positive bias score for the team involved you will see a name (of the ref) and a green line and a number. The bias number for that ref.
On the other hand if the ref had a negative bias you will see again a name but then with a red line and a number. The negative bias score for that ref.
The longer the line the higher the number and the higher that bias has been from the ref. Short lines are better and would be nicer for all. I also included a little table in the graphic just with the names and with a red or green label in case you want to take a quick look at the names on their own.
So here we go with West Ham United.
So in this table we see that 4 refs had a negative bias. The worst one seems to be Mike Dean. He sure doesn’t seem to like London clubs in general one could say. And the same could be said about Anthony Taylor with a big negative bias.
We also have two refs with a rather small negative bias with Mark Clattenburg and Neil Swarbrick. That is the way we want to see it. I mean the small part, not the negative bias.
On the other hand rather a lot of refs have a positive bias in favour of West Ham last season. Mason and Marinner can be called relatively small (too big to my liking still) but from then on it looks nothing but good things coming from the referees Webb, Oliver, Foy, Atkinson and certainly Phil Dowd. they all seem to have something going for WHU.
I would now have liked to add the results of West Ham of last season but for some strange reason they are not available for me for the moment. When I can find them I will add them of course. But for the moment I cannot find them.
Maybe they have gone lost in one of those cyber attacks we had to face over the last year
- 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: the red card disaster
- 34: Lee Probert: This is not acceptable
- 35: Mark Clattenburg: good on red, poor on yellow
- 36: Mark Halsey: under half his penalty decisions were correct
- 37: Martin Atkinson. This is not a Fifa ref
- 38: Michael Jones: Poor discipline
- 39: Michael Oliver: This doesn’t look too clever
- 40: Mike Dean – an unacceptable bias.
- 41: Neil Swarbrick. Every goal right but oh the bias
- 42: Phil Dowd: After a good year, a year in decline
- 43: Roger East a short term solution
- 44: The Referee Competency League Table
- 45. The most unbiased referee in the PL
- 46 The best ref of the season 2012/13
- 47. Wigan and the bias of the refs
Just read an (yet another) article on the “red-nosed one” (RNO) on telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/football/teams/manchester-united/Sir_Alex_Ferguson/10392716/Sir-Alex-Ferguson-losing-the-Premier-League-title-to-Manchester-City-was-biggest-blow-of-my-United-reign.html
“Kind, older colleagues had put in a good word for me with Ferguson in my early days in journalism, and our relationship was always cordial, despite the ticking off he once gave me over the phone for something I had written about Roy Keane (perversely, I was flattered that he had bothered to call in the first place)”
Makes me question a few things:
1) How common is it for managers to call up journalists and tick them off for being critical to their players?
2) “Older colleagues had put in a good word for me with Ferguson” – does that not mean that RNO controlled the entire narrative in the press about Man Utd? (this guy is no mug, he went on to become the chief sports writer for telegraph).
3) If the media was so joined at the hip with RNO and so were the referees (for example Refs like clattenburg and halsey running for help to RNO), what does it say about the credibility of the EPL?
4) For all his achievements, is the RNO also a psychopath who managed to bully people in getting the results he wanted?
@Sam
It’s amazing how much people feared him.
Was there not one journalist, referee of FA memeber brave enough to oppose him ?