RefWatch – Liverpool Vs Arsenal (03/03/2012 – 12:45) « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News, supporting the club, the players and the manager
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- Referee: Mark Halsey
- Assistant 1: Simon Bennett
- Assistant 2: Ron Ganfield
- 4th Official: Lee Mason
Good morning stat-fans and welcome to RefWatch… It’s just a quick one today as I noticed an anomaly in my booking index tables and, upon further inspection, I noticed that bookings for cup competitions were being included in the graph… this required a bit of a re-jig to the table views and a rebuild of my booking cache table structure – the issue is that the data is sourced from multiple locations and the first table (Vs Team) uses a different and much simplified dataset to the booking index – and this is what first alerted me to the issue.
So apologies if any previous RefWatch tables also contained booking information for cup games i.e. not EPL/ECH only (as they should be).
Anyhoo – while I was there I thought I would tweak things a bit and it’s just as well I give you a run down so you know what’s what. From now on the booking breakdown averages will be calculated thus:
Yellow card = 1 booking Second yellow = 1.5 bookings
Straight Red = 2 bookings
This is an attempt to weight the booking and give a more representative picture… hopefully there are no bugs with it but if there are then let me know and I’ll address them ASAP.
Anyway – after I did all that it was 22:22 on Friday and I didn’t have time to write anything interesting or that might get me dubbed as a ‘tin foil hatter’ by all those witty young things that rock up on these pages to tell us, off the top of their tin-foil free heads, what’s what.
Asian Handicap (betting line) market:
| Home | Handicap | Away |
|---|---|---|
| 2.100 | 0 – 1/2 | 1.800 |
The Under/Over market:
| Over | Handicap | Under |
|---|---|---|
| 1.875 | 2 1/2 | 2.025 |
Some advice for you most credulous of cretins:- we do our research where as you read The Sun and listen to TalkSport. We are the experts – not you, please bear that in mind as you shake your heads in denial… not Liverpool fans – obviously, as from what I gather, they are well aware that certain referees can be hostile and are probably more open to this kind of analysis than those grubby little Orcs from down the lane who were on here last week.
Let’s have a look at the Referee:
- Full name: Mark R. Halsey
- Date of birth: 08-Jul-1961 (Age 51)
- Place of birth: Welwyn Garden City
- Resides: Lancashire
- EPL/ECH Referee Since: 1999/2000
- EPL/ECH Games to date: 283
Mark Halsey – Let’s get ready to rumble!
It’s Mark Halsey again… you remember him from our excellent open source referee reviews:
Wow just scraping by Marky boy – better have a stormer this game to bring those numbers up!
Mark didn’t get many games in the 2009/2010 season (and after) due to some serious health problems – but he still seems to get the odd game every now and then. You would have to expect that Mark’s time in the top flight is winding down and we would hope that he’ll try and do his best to give a consistent performance.
Let’s check out his stats!
Mark Halsey has had 30 games for Liverpool consisting of 15 wins, 7 draws and 8 losses.
Liverpool are currently in 7th in Mark Halsey’s personal Points Per Game League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, with an average of 1.73 PPG.
In Mark Halsey’s personal Handicap Swing League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, Liverpool come 7th with an average positive swing of 0.13.
Liverpool are currently in 9th in Mark Halsey’s personal Booking’s Per Match League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, with an overall average of 0.93 BPM.
In Mark Halsey’s personal Fouls Per Booking League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, Liverpool come 13th with an overall average of 11.39 FPB.
There is a rather strikingly high line for Liverpool’s FPB – this is also quite thin to indicate not many bookings per match. In comparison we can see that Liverpool’s opposition also get very few bookings per match but, they also give away fewer fouls. Of late we can see a crossover in the FPB/BPM lines for Liverpool and their opposition and this is also reflected in a slight drop in Liverpool’s performance against the handicap and their average points per game (the blue line).
Above is a seasonal breakdown on how, when and where Liverpool took all their bookings under Mark Halsey.
There seems to be a fairly constant Midfield booking trend running through what few bookings Liverpool have taken under Mark Halsey and although these are trending to be slightly later in the match we can see some Attack and Defence bookings coming into Liverpool’s figures that draw the overall trend to be more and earlier.
Above is a seasonal breakdown on how, when and where Liverpool’s opposition took all their bookings under Mark Halsey.
Again we can see that Mark is not very handy with the cards for Liverpool’s opposition and his data really doesn’t show much in way the of trends and/or correlation to Liverpool’s booking index. One thing to note is that recently Liverpool’s opposition tend to get booked fairly late in the game.
Let’s check out how Arsenal do under Mark Halsey:
Mark Halsey has had 20 games for Arsenal consisting of 12 wins, 5 draws and 3 losses.
Arsenal are currently in 5th in Mark Halsey’s personal Points Per Game League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, with an average of 2.05 PPG.
In Mark Halsey’s personal Handicap Swing League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, Arsenal come 4th with an average positive swing of 0.36.
Arsenal are currently in 18th in Mark Halsey’s personal Booking’s Per Match League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, with an overall average of 1.20 BPM.
In Mark Halsey’s personal Fouls Per Booking League (for teams with a minimum of 5 matches played), for matches in the EPL/ECH, Arsenal come 18th with an overall average of 9.42 FPB.
Wow… hmm – I’m not entirely sure what to make of Mark’s graph as some of it is very counter intuitive. For a start in 2007/2008 it appears that Mark was pretty happy with the cards for our opposition yet we see a slight drop in form. In the 2008/2009 and 2009/2010 seasons Mark Halsey gave our opposition precisely zero cards yet we showed a massive over performance – to be fair though the heavy win in 2009/2010 (against Blackburn I think as I remember taking my dad to the game) was our only game that season as Mark was taken seriously ill shortly after and had to take time off to recover – so we could call that an anomaly. Last season was our worst under Halsey for a very long time but I think that this is more to do with the style of refereeing that Mark adopts and even though he allows a very English game he seems fairly consistent with it. I think off the top of my tin-foil clad head that our opposition under Mark last season were Wolves and Stoke and, to be fair, the ‘English’ game is something that they seem to train for.
Above is a seasonal breakdown on how, when and where Arsenal took all their bookings under Mark Halsey.
Not much to say here really – very few bookings and what we do receive is trending to fairly late in the match.
Above is a seasonal breakdown on how, when and where Arsenal’s opposition took all their bookings under Mark Halsey.
Our opposition’s bookings seem to correlate quite nicely with our booking figures in terms of match time and volume and I’m finding it hard to read any trends here.
Let’s move on now to check out how Mark Halsey performs against selected teams in the EPL:
This is by far the most bonkers “Referee Vs. EPL” graph that I think that I’ve generated – It’s insane! First of all IGNORE all the zero point intersects as these are seasons that Mark hasn’t had any games for the club in question. If we do that we can see that Manchester United are the consistent performers under Mark Halsey. Arsenal had, as we mentioned earlier, a stonking season in 2009/2010 but this was a single game and all the other clubs in the graph hit the zero intersect that season indicating that they had no games. Liverpool does OK in terms of points – but not quite as well as Arsenal in the great scheme of things… in fact they show a slight under performance. As for Manchester City – well – just look at it will you, a record of complete and utter disaster.
So – what to expect from this ref? Well – I think that this may be a fairly physical encounter and we should prepare ourselves to get ‘stuck in’ as it were and meet Liverpool firmly in the challenge – Liverpool (like us) are not a physical team so we should be fairly evenly matched and all in all I would say that we should have the opportunity to take all three points from this one – but we will have to work hard to get them.