A call to arms; let’s sort out this refereeing issue once and for all « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
By DogFace.
Untold Readers – this summer we have an opportunity to build upon the foundations that we furtively dug… or marked out – or maybe we first need to dig the foundations then build upon them?
Allow me recap; our plan is to watch the watchers and keep a close eye on football matches from a refereeing perspective – regular readers will know that the standard of refereeing in the EPL has long been a bee in our bonnet and we are at the stage now where we are suggesting that something stinks, not only with the standard of refereeing but also the consistency with regards to personal prejudice and bias (be that on a team, region or player/racial/nationality basis).
This was discussed here:
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/12352
And here:
http://blog.emiratesstadium.info/archives/12395
Of course we can’t just stand up and shout from the rooftops that something is amiss and declare that something is rotten in the state of Denmark (we tried that and you all, quite rightly, shouted back “Prove it” and (rightly or wrongly) “I never rated Bendtner anyway”) – so what we have to do is go into some more in depth analysis on the situation. But to do this takes a considerable amount of man hours and specialist skills. So, all construction metaphors aside – we need help, so is there anyone out there who is handy with a shovel?
And this is where you [lucky reader] come in! Untold needs you – your team needs you and your sport needs you in a very special project!
This project is not Arsenal-centric, and we will not go into it with any preconceptions or blunt axes and let us be clear that this is merely ‘phase 1’ of our project – that being ‘total awareness’ of officiating through data gathering i.e. all correct calls, all incorrect calls and all the calls that should have been… the analysis will be phase 2 and we will share our data with affiliated sites that carry out specialist football analysis to a very high standard.
To start with we will need to get together a list of qualified referees who know their onions from their shallots who are willing to give some of their time every week to watch an EPL football match and take notes on referee performance – this will be via a standardised electronic ‘point and click’ interface so there will be more watching and assessing than writing i.e. we’ll try to make it as easy as possible for you. Walter and Laundryender will be your points of contact for this and they will define the guidelines.
Next, we will need to get an I.T. chap (or chaps) who know a bit about building websites – we would ideally like to create a new bespoke site for the EPL referee data that will not only present/mirror some analysis that appears in Untold but also provides the interface for registered referee’s to enter match data. So if you can cut code – here is your chance to make a difference. I [DogFace] will be your point of contact for this… and don’t worry – I’m in the industry and worked in the commercial sector for over 20 years so I won’t piss you off by asking you dumb questions or raising impossible specifications. I will be taking charge of the back end of the site with regards to database administration, basic analysis and dataset generation – but I can also muck in with the coding side of things and help support the site once it is running.
Finally I could do with a researcher to help me make sense of some of the data I have – you need no other skills than the ability to use Google or have a login to your teams Arsenal TV Online (or equivalent) account in order to watch football matches in full. I will just dish out a list with the player name and the time in the match (to the nearest second) and you need to take note of what happened – to explain, I have been given some data relating to match events but everything is encoded – this would help me enormously to crack the code by way of a lookup table – this data (if it does, as I suspect, contain referee decisions) could then hopefully be used to pre-populate a web form detailing the referee calls to save time when our assessors do their match referee reviews.
We will need to move fairly quickly on this – so if you think that you can help and would like to be a part of the Untold team then please leave a comment below.
Many thanks,
Untold Arsenal