The unbelievable unacceptable truth. A first preview of the season numbers about the refs « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

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By Walter Broeckx

This is just a first step. Not yet a real conclusion of the season. But a first preview of what the ref reviews have learned us about Arsenal this season.

The numbers are very interesting/worrying/criminal/crazy/… make your pick after reading the rest of the article.

Now I will only take on the biggest things in this. I hope that when working together with Dogface in a few weeks we will be able to do this for almost every team in the games we reviewed. So I will not talk about cards, be them yellow or red, but let us just take on the two most important things in footballs that have an influence on the final result: Goals and penalties.

Arsenal has been on the wrong end of goals given against us that should have been cancelled or goals from Arsenal that have been wrongly cancelled. If I have counted it correctly we have been on the wrong end  8 times. Yes that is eight goals.

On the other hand we had 2 (two) goals that were not given and should have been given for the other team.

So if we have to believe the almighty theory from the FA, the PGMOL and the media about things evening out we should get 6 goals given to us.  The refs and the PGMOL will surely give us those 6 goals in the next two games. Or otherwise have they been telling us fairy tales?

And Arsenal has been on the wrong end of penalty decisions a few times also. That is penalties not given to Arsenal when they should have been given. Or penalties given against us that were not penalties. The total count so far is 19 (nineteen!). I must say that even I fell of my chair when seeing this number. We had 3 penalties given this season so far. And this should have been 22 in fact.

I don’t know about you but just imagine that even only half of those penalties would have been given? Can you imagine the impact this must have had on our total points?

Now of course we also have been lucky at times. We escaped some penalties. In fact we escaped 2 penalties this season. One against WBA and one against QPR.

So once again if we have to believe the almighty theory from all those who say it is so without ever giving evidence it should even out. But so far we have had 19 decisions not given against us and 2 in our favour. That is a difference of 17 penalties!! I don’t know about you but this doesn’t sound like something that will even out.

Unless the refs from the PGMOL will give us those penalties in the last two games of the season…  That would mean our defenders can hack down any opponent in our penalty box without being punished. Or our strikers could go down without contact and penalties given for nothing. Ah, for a moment I forgot … we are not young any more.

Now last season I only did the Arsenal games. I then found that it didn’t even out at the end of the season.

This season together with my ref reviewers we have done all the Arsenal games once again (and a few hundred other games)  and again we do not see one sign of things evening out at the end of the season.

So the first times we examine the theory we seem to find that it is nothing more than that: a theory. A wrong theory in fact. I think it is a lie told by people who want us to believe it and who want the audience to believe it.

I will come back to this with more numbers later in the next weeks and months. But it is just a lie that things even out. Nothing more nothing less. It is a theory based on nothing. Our numbers prove it.

And if you don’t believe it… Well, fine. Nobody can force you to believe that the earth is circling around the sun. You can still believe the sun is circling around planet earth. And if you think we start from a biased position as Arsenal supporters seeking to prove something to fit the theory, well that is how science works – by examining a theory (that things even out) and drawing in evidence.

In fact I would like people to challenge our numbers. I would like people to come up with evidence that it does even out. It would make me the football lover much happier. Because it hurts me to see that they are telling us fairy tales.  I had wished that it would even out.

But it doesn’t.

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