Wednesday, January 5th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger in all he does
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By DogFace
- Referee: Mike Jones
- Assistant 1: Darren Cann
- Assistant 2: Stephen Child
- 4th Official: Stuart Attwell
Good day stat-fans and welcome again to another article in the famous RefWatch series (as read in the Alpha Centauri system where they [the Gooolagh a tri-sexed silicone based sentient society] like a bit of a flutter). As you may already know RefWatch is the first slice of Hovis in an Untold Referee Sandwich. I was going to use the ‘spit roast’ simile here but the mental imagery that conjured up was such that… well, why stoop to such plutonious [I claim that word in the name of DogFace] titillatious [and that one] tabloid levels to draw attention to one’s cause when we are already light years ahead of the competition!
We invent words and assign meaning FFS, it don’t get more cutting edge than that son!
Ahem, as you recall we’ve already had Mike Jones this season and I took the piss out of him for not knowing the rules pertaining to beach balls on the field of play; or maybe he just forgot ‘em that day? Either way, it’s fair to say, that in every match [so far], things have gone our way.
Let’s have a look at the referee known as Mike Jones:
- Full name: Mike J. Jones
- Date of birth: 18 April 1968 (1968-04-18) (age 42)
- Place of birth: Chester, England
- EPL Referee Since: 2008/2009
- EPL Games to date: 47
Wait… you lead and I’ll follow?!
Mike Jones has not had many matches, as you can see, being recently promoted to the Select Group and enjoying his first EPL game in the 2008/2009 season. In truth – I do not have much in the way of data for either the referee or the fourth official, so take all the stats with a fat pinch of salt, but what we do have is as follows:
Mike Jones has had 4 games for Arsenal consisting of 4 wins, 0 draws and 0 losses – which is nice… and two of those games were this season which is even better.
Arsenal are currently in 1st in Mike Jones’s personal Points Per Game League, for matches in the English Premier, with an average of 3.00 PPG, which is again rather sexy but we should bear in mind that there are only 4 games there, all of them at home and all against teams we should expect to beat.
In Mike Jones’s personal Handicap Swing League , for matches in the English Premier, Arsenal come 1st with an average positive swing of 2.75 – double top for Arsenal in Jonesy’s stats although, as I said, fat pinch of salt – but it is worthy of note that an average swing of 2.75 is pretty chunky – in 4 matches (EPL) we have seen 15 goals scored by Arsenal (against West Ham, Blackpool, Fulham and Wigan) without reply.
Arsenal are currently in 11th in Mike Jones’s personal Booking’s Per Match League , for matches in the English Premier, with an overall average of 1.50 BPM… this is a little more worrying in that we come 11th but also that this figure is very low i.e. Mike Jones is not exactly ‘card happy’ and you can see this above, in the last two games [this season under Jones] we have seen an average of 11.5 FPB for both Arsenal and their opponents… although wait just a tick – in those four games our pal Mikey Boy (to his mates) dished out a red card to our competition [Blackpool] for a foul on the last man – which was a shame as I recall at the time as Les Tangerines were up for a proper game of football and it was shaping up to be a good-un.
In Mike Jones’s personal Fouls Per Booking League, for matches in the English Premier, Arsenal come 14th with an overall average of 6.67 FPB – again, this is not great but 6.67 FPB doesn’t seem too bad and it wouldn’t be unless you considered that 1st placed Everton get away with an average 18 FPB – which seems rather odd (I’ll get back to this later).
Let’s move on now and have a look at Manchester City’s form under Jones:
Mike Jones has had 5 games for Manchester City consisting of 4 wins, 1 draw and 0 losses – right, that’s disappointing from an Arsenal perspective, but let’s dig a little deeper.
Manchester City are currently in 3rd in Mike Jones’ personal Points Per Game League , for matches in the English Premier, with an average of 2.60 PPG – again, to be expected given the above.
In Mike Jones’ personal Handicap Swing League, for matches in the English Premier, Manchester City come 3rd with an average positive swing of 1.15. That is also a very respectable swing against the handicap, not as good as ours – but still a great figure. It seems though that this season, in the one game that City have played under Jones, City’s swing has swung into the negative (at -1.25) due to the home draw against Birmingham City on the 13/11/2010.
Manchester City are currently in 6th in Mike Jones’ personal Booking’s Per Match League, for matches in the English Premier, with an overall average of 1.20 BPM – overall, about right.
In Mike Jones’ personal Fouls Per Booking League, for matches in the English Premier, Manchester City come 4th with an overall average of 10.00 FPB – again, we see high numbers for Jones’ FPB and City can’t complain with 4th place.
It seems to me though that the booking numbers (FPB and BPM) relate entirely to the team that is playing, i.e. the style of play – so I think I will have to do some research and find a correlation for these, against the results, on a team by team or ref by ref (or both) basis in order to get some value out of them in terms of referee performance and bias as, as it stands from my observations, they are not as useful as I thought they could be; for instance in the charts above; when we see the crossover of FPB (for the stated team and their opposition) we also see a negative correlation against the handicap, this is counter-intuitive but it crops up again and again – answers to that riddle on a postcard please?!
The 4th Official (Stuart Attwell)
Despite being a new boy in the EPL Stuart has a rich history of fairly high profile [for the championship] cock-ups in his wake and he has continued this fine form into the EPL – go on, for a laugh, google them:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=stuart+attwell+cock+up
This is why, no doubt, Stuart rose through the refereeing racks with such alacrity and I already have the ambitious little tyke earmarked as the next Howard Webb [who, in turn, is the next Graham Poll].
Due to the lack of sample data we have on Stuart Attwell for us and Manchester City I’m just going to do a quick run through what we have without the graphics.
Stuart Attwell has had 1 game for Arsenal consisting of 1 win, 0 draws and 0 losses – this match had a positive handicap swing of +3.00. We were booked twice with an average of 5.50 FPB… in the one game we had under him against Bolton, on the 11/09/2010, we won 4-1 and Bolton saw a red card.
Stuart Attwell has had 2 games for Manchester City consisting of 1 win, 1 draw and 0 losses – these matches had a positive handicap swing of +1.50. City averaged 2.00 BPM and 5.50 FPB which is identical to Arsenal including a red card for the opposition [Wigan] on the 29/03/2010 in which City won 3-0 – there other game was a 3-3 draw against Burnley on the 07/11/2009.
So… watch out for the reds and no wild challenges lads!
Let’s have a look now at how Mike Jones has performed against the League in terms of the handicap swing (selected teams only):
You can see that we’ve taken a big dive against the handicap but this was from the dizzy heights of +4.00 and we are still in the black this season with +1.5. Manchester City has dived too; and into the red with -1.25 from +2.5 in the previous season. Aston Villa seem to be solid performers under him and Tottenham are on the rise. As I said, not much data but interesting to ponder none the less.
So in conclusion it is dangerous to draw too many conclusions on this one, Jonesy has been all right for us [for four games] but I just don’t trust this new bunch as far as I could throw them – if I had to call it I would say that, unless Mike Jones has a sudden and inexplicable change in his style of refereeing, we should take all three points… after all – in the last 5 games we have played under Mike Jones or Stuart Attwell we have scored 19 goals, conceded 1 and have had 2 red cards in our favour – Manchester City have [over 8 games under Attwell and Jones] scored 17, conceded 6 and had 1 red card in their favour.
Personally though – I’m just hoping for a fair match, if we get that we will win as we are the better team, we’ll have the pitch the way we want, no bus-ride home to the wastelands to look forward to and the crowd behind us.
Come on you reds – this is a big one!
An index that is so untold you won’t be able to tell anything from it