Arsenal – West Ham : what can we expect from the ref? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By Walter Broeckx
As a few people were interested in my comments on the refs in previous games when we talked about the refs (and they did gave us plenty to talk about) I will try to add my referee part to the reviews if I can find the time.
Otherwise they say I talk with hindsight as with the case of Dean. But I thought I had bored you to death with me (and Dogface) warning you for him.
Yet apparently some people still didn’t know it. And some people telling me to talk after the game was a bit easy. It was but that is not my fault. That is more to do with what Dean has been doing again and again for years. But I could and should have warned you more before the game.
And I should have warned you also about the Atkinson-Chelsea combination. A combination I also thought was well known. And we had it confirmed during the game by the official not being able to hide his bias and resulting in some very debatable goals for Chelsea.
So I will try to do this and if Tony doesn’t mind we can add this to our game preview articles. Not that I possess all the graphics Dogface has but if possible I will try to add a few. But don’t know if I can make it work!
So Andre Marriner it is for the game against West Ham United. 42 years old and should be in his top years. He only has 4 seasons left as a Fifa ref where they have an age limit of 45 and he is from Birmingham it seems. So an outsider for a derby game. Well it couldn’t be any other way as …well there are no London refs to be found.
So how do we usually fair under Marriner? For those who like some graphics I will try to make it visible.
According to my numbers we have had him in 15 games in the PL so far. And we won 9 of those games, had a draw in 2 games and lost 4 of those games. So this gives us a win percentage of 60%. And that is a rather normal win % for Arsenal.
And the same thing we do now for West Ham and try to show you a graphic.
He has done 17 games when West Ham was involved and West Ham only won 3 of those games. That is far worse than their average win % this season but I think not that far off their usual record in the PL over the last years.
When it comes to penalties I have seen that he gave the same amount of penalties in our favour as against us and the same goes for West Ham.
In fact in our last year’s review he came out as one of the best refs in total. He had great competency numbers in general. A total of 75% of correct decisions was well above the average score of 70%.
And also his bias numbers were rather good. His home/away bias was almost the “normal” bias we found. And in the team bias we found many teams having no real positive or negative bias in the games we reviewed.
So the overall picture is of a ref who usually is not really biased. But who can have a bad game. One of those games was last years game between Blackburn – Arsenal. He gave an offside goal to Blackburn (assistant missed it) but he also didn’t give a blatant penalty for a foul from Robinson on Walcott in the last minute of the game. That cost him lots of points and gave him a rather negative Arsenal bias score. Some may also remember the game Arsenal – Liverpool two seasons ago with some late penalties being awarded in that game.
But in the other games he did when Arsenal was around I can’t remember much wrong. So I think it was more down to a bad day at the office.
So unless he has a bad day today I expect a referee who knows his rules and who will not try to tilt the game.
If you like it I will try to do this for each game. That is, if I can find the time. Because with the work I also do for the http://www.refereedecisions.co.uk/ website where you can see a review each day of the week of a PL game coming online, I sometimes find a day should have more than 24 hours.