Atwell relegated by PGMO. So are Untold Ref Reviews on the right track? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager

By Walter Broeckx

Today the news came out that ref Stuart Atwell has been demoted from the PL referees and has been put back to the Football league. He was only 25 when he did his first game in the EPL, the youngest ref ever and now at 29 years he is put back down one class. This isn’t the end yet for him but it sure doesn’t look good for the rest of his career.

So when I read this I thought I would take a look at our numbers to see if he somehow deserved this relegation from the Premier league. And so we can see if what we are doing is somehow correct. In fact this is a blessing for our ref reviewing system to see if we are on the right track when assessing referees like we do. So here we go.

The first thing is that we only have covered 3 games of Attwell this season. One of those games I have seen live as it was our 1-0 win against Swansea early in the season. He was excellent on the day and had a high score of  80%. One of the best scores for a ref in Arsenal games.

He also did the games Arsenal – Wolverhampton and then his score was only 58%. So a big contrast one could say.  We also reviewed another of his games. Manchester United against Norwich and in this game he also got a rather low score with only 58%.

So not that much of data about this ref in our reviews so far. But nevertheless I think it is worth looking at where he made mistakes and if he has any good things to show. And I made a nice graphic about re Atwell and his most important scores.

So in this graphic we see the most worrying trend. The dark blue line is the score of the important decisions (goal, penalties, red and yellow cards) and this line is the bottom line. And in fact it should be the top line. Mind you not many ref have this line as their top line. But it is fair to say that this is the ref with the biggest difference between that line and the rest.

The overall decisions is much higher. And when we gave a bit of weight to his decisions he even got better points. This will be an indication that he usually was better in calling the fouls in the middle of the field and handing out yellow cards.

But the bad thing about his performances in the 3 games we did was that he always had a lot of troubles with the important calls. And maybe this is the reason they put him back.

But if however we put him in a league table and this is based on the average points each ref has got until now we come up with this Referee league table:

Average score after 83 games
Nr,	Ref	Score	Games
1	Moss	86,04	1
2	Dowd	78,77	8
3	Jones	76,70	6
4	Oliver	76,63	4
5	Clattenburg	73,74	6
6	Friend	72,65	4
7	Dean	72,49	9
8	Atkinson	70,38	6
9	Webb	70,30	10
10	Marinner	70,12	4
11	Halsey	66,96	4
12	Atwell	65,59	3
13	Foy	65,04	3
14	Taylor	63,89	2
15	Probert	62,74	5
16	Mason	62,20	3
17	Walton	60,17	5

And then we see that Atwell is in place 12. But there are other refs who are behind him with even lower scores and they can stay in the EPL.

So I am not complaining that the PGMO is putting a ref back. If he is not good enough he has to go. But if Atwell is not good enough what about those others who have even lower scores? Why are refs like Probert still there? Or Walton? Why doesn’t the PGMO put them back?

I can accept that Rome wasn’t build in a day so you cannot put back 4 or 5 refs at the same time but we have seen that some of Atwell decision making is under par. The PGMO comes to the same conclusion so the hope is there that we also will be rid of some under performing refs in the summer.

The sad thing is that Atwell despite losing a few games under him (last year if I remember right) was not a ref that had a completely visible anti-Arsenal bias. Whilst others who have shown a clear anti-Arsenal bias in recent years and who have lower scored are still in the PL.