Why does WBA (like Arsenal) get so many referee wrong calls? « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
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Our thoughts are of course with Fabrice Muamba.
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By Walter Broeckx
One of the great things about Untold is that some of the comments give me a lot of inspiration for looking in to new articles. And this time the article might be interesting to read for WBA and QPR supporters as I will try to cover those teams a bit. Some will not like what I write but some will see what they feel confirmed.
We had a WBA supporter on Untold recently who told how sick he was about the referees after the MU- WBA game. And I was thinking: is his feeling based on something or was it like we get to hear so many times: just a sour loser?
We then had the excellent article about the PGMOL and their link with their sponsor who also is one of the sponsors or QPR. And then I wanted to see if we could see something if we compare the numbers of WBA and QPR so far this season.
And of course I mainly focused on the wrong calls, the mistakes of the refs one could say or the not given fouls, penalties, goals, cards.
Of course we know that in our reviews we try to focus on the top teams and thus we don’t have as many games in our review database as we have from the other ‘top’ teams in the EPL. But so far we have done 4 games of each team. Those 4 games are done more or less against the top teams as this is the only time we take a look at those teams. So one could expect that those teams are on the bad end of decisions as it could be that they are the victims of the big team bias.
But I have noticed something a bit strange. One would think that both teams will be on the bad end of wrong calls. But this isn’t the way things stand for the moment.
If we take West Bromwich Albion first. And their supporter Simon wrote: WBA Fan here. It’s just so dammed frustrating for us smaller clubs. It’s a pattern that we first noticed some 10 years now and are used to it. It’s the 55- 45 rule on decisions, just enough to influence the game but not so blindly obvious to attract enquiries. There is only doubt , and unfairness. Is there corruption in our game ? no never !!, is there ?
Well Simon let me tell you the truth. The truth that we, as Arsenal supporting referees, have seen about your team. In fact you could see this as a rather unbiased view on your 55-45 rule.
The hard truth is that you have it wrong. I could almost say completely wrong. Because WBA have been on the wrong end of bad calls a lot. In fact they are second in my own Wrong Call bias league table. They have had a total of 69.17% of the calls going against them. That is just under 70%. So a whole lot more than the 55% Simon thought it was.
Now of course it could be that our ref reviewers are somehow biased. And that might be the reason that Arsenal is first in the wrong calls league table.
BUT fair enough if people say we are biased when it comes to Arsenal. But then have a look at this table from a website which is doing something similar to that which we do, although not as detailed as we do it. And if you did take a look by now you will have seen that in their table Arsenal has been the most hit by important wrong calls and West Bromwich Albion is in second place. And the same is true in the overall wrong calls league table.
You can call Untold biased but the debatable decision website is not an Arsenal related website. In fact I have disagreed with them on a few occasions when it came to Arsenal decisions.
Now let us move on to the Queens Park Rangers. They are in the wrong calls league table the team that has the 3rd lowest calls going against them. With Manchester United in first (surprise, surprise) and with Stoke in second place. Anyone got a good reason why Stoke is so loved by the refs? But I was talking about QPR. They get very few calls going against them in the games we reviewed.
Because their games was also mostly against top teams you could expect them to have a similar record compared to WBA. But they only get around 38% of the calls going against them. Compared to the almost 70% this really is a low score for “small team”.
And once again I can link you to the debatable decisions website and from their numbers they also have QPR in third place when it comes from points won from ‘mistakes by the refs.
And then you keep in mind the excellent article from Dave Right on Untold http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/19549 and then you could start wondering about a few things.
Maybe Dave Right was right in his article….Simon was right in a way but he didn’t know how right he was until now.
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The coming week in the Premier League: the Untold Preview
PGMOL – the referees’ association: a secret body in breach of its own terms of reference