REFEREE REVIEW 2012: Michael Jones – double the normal negative away bias! Shame! « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. 800,000 visits last month

—————————————————

This article is part of the series : REFEREE REVIEW 2012

—————————————————-

The club that changed football

Making the Arsenal

By DogFace and Walter Broeckx
Untold Arsenal has a team of qualified referees who have reviewed more than 40% of the EPL games from last season. The reviews themselves were based on full match video footage with the advantage of video technology features such as slow motion and pause.
By reviewing those 155 games we have made a database of more than 7000 decisions that have been judged by our panel of dedicated and qualified referees.
The numbers you will see are based on those decisions and those reviewed games.

Next in our series is Ref Michael Jones.

We did 12 games of this ref and that is just under 50% of his total games in the PL. Not a bad score I would say.

And if you don’t think it is enough I got good news for you as on our new website we seem to manage to do all the games in the PL so far this season.

Let us take a look at his basic competency.

We are having a few good refs for the moment in our review system. Michael Jones with a score of 76% correct decisions is one of the better refs.

And when we put weight on the decisions he drops a bit but a score of 74,75% is better than the league average. So that is a promising start to this review. Let us see how we got to this numbers by looking at the different type of decisions.

A score of just under 92% for the goal decisions. In line with the league average but as I have said a few times before: we need to have a higher score as the goals are the decisive factor in a football game.

The offside decisions are slightly worse than the league average.  And thus far away from the 99%.

The other decisions are rather good with a score of over 76% correct. Not bad at all this. It shows he can spot a foul when needed.

The penalty decisions are also not that bad compared to the league average. But still a type of decisions I would like to see a bit higher if possible.

And the same goes for the red cards. This is a bit better than the league average but with 30% still too low for me to call it ok.

The yellow card decisions are almost the same as the league average. Something to further improve.

Was there any visible home or away bias?

Yes there is. In fact a very big negative away bias even. Almost the double than we found in general with all the refs. So not really a pleasing numbers. Well if you are a home team it will please you maybe but for football in general we would like to have a bit more balance in this.

And if we put weight on the decisions the scores get higher. So certainly a home biased referee in his games last season.

Let me give you one example on this. We know that Arsenal didn’t get any penalties at home last season. Well that is not the complete truth to be honest. We did get a penalty. In fact we got 2 penalties. Both given by the same ref in the same game. It was Michael Jones who gave us two penalties in the FA cup match against Aston Villa. It were clear penalties but the question remains: was it the influence of the crowd that made him blow them? It would have been interesting to see if he would have done the same thing for Arsenal away from home.

Let us have a look at the different teams involved in these games.

13 teams involved in total and 6 teams have a bias score of lower than 3. The most favoured teams are Chelsea, Manchester United and Bolton. That last one will come as a surprise maybe.

For the teams with a negative bias we find Wigan as the most hit team. Arsenal and Newcastle are also not the ref’s  favourite team it seems.

If we put weight on the decisions we see the same picture but we see the numbers mostly rising a lot.

Bolton and Wigan look to be the opposite teams. Wigan on the losing end and Bolton having the decisions going their way. Arsenal are also having a bad time.

If you look at the weighted numbers you can see that he made rather a lot of big mistakes. The numbers have shot up a lot.

FINAL CONCLUSION

According to the competency he has done a good job overall. And he deserves a place in the PL based on those numbers.

What we don’t like at all in these numbers is the fact that he has shown a big home and away bias and probably worse: he has shown a big bias in favour of some teams.

And that is something we don’t like at all. Something he should improve on this current season. It’s all good and fine to have competent refs but they also should be free of bias. Be it home or away bias or just in favour or against one team.