Saturday, August 27th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx, the Untold ref

So here we are after 2 weeks in the EPL this season. A short roundup of the state of affair in the wonderful world of the refs.

We have been able to cover 9 games in the EPL so far. It should have been 10 but because of the fact that Tottenham – Everton was postponed we still have to keep that game for later. So a big thanks to our ref reviewers so far and let us hope we can carry on like we are doing.

Of course after only doing 9 games you cannot draw definite conclusions and say: this is how it is. But we can try to look at possible trends we can see in the games.

Let us start with a table of the refs so far

Ref	Important	Overall	Weight	Average	Game
Walton	50,00	55,00	63,16	56,05	Newcastle – Arsenal
Atkinson	66,67	82,14	74,36	74,39	Arsenal – Liverpool
Dean	77,78	80,00	83,72	80,50	City-Swansea
Halsey	57,14	65,00	64,56	62,23	Stoke-Chelsea
Dowd	95,00	89,13	86,79	90,31	Liverpool-Sunderland
Jones	85,71	79,59	82,26	82,52	WBA – Utd
Probert	70,00	71,11	73,21	71,44	Man U – Tottenham
Mason	68,42	72,00	73,13	71,18	Chelsea – WBA
Jones	66,67	78,69	74,70	73,35	Bolton – Man City
Average	70,82	74,74	75,10	73,55

Most refs have taken a good start of the season. As you can see the average score is above the magical 70% mark. So a big hurray for the refs.

However what I find a bit worrying is the fact that the lowest average score is made in the department where there is little margin for error. Because the important decisions are well….. the most important ones to make. And it should be those that should be correct.

And as you can see the average is only 70,82%. So if the refs have to make 10 important decisions, they will have 3 of them wrong. I must say this is not a number that makes me happy. Give the boys some assistance please. They obviously need some.

Are there other things to report yet? Well I was planning on keeping records of the wrong calls. The calls that were not made when they had to be made. The calls or non calls that can show some kind of bias. And yet again this is only after 2 weeks and so it is not possible to draw conclusions at this stage of the league.

Now if you take a look at this table I would ask you to have a look at Chelsea and City to start with. And then you can see that Chelsea away got more calls against them and at home got only 20 % of the calls against them. And also City got in their home game only 20% of the calls going against them. But at Bolton they got over 80% of the calls going against them. I think those numbers are too high but this could be down to the “home advantage” in the calls from the refs.

Wrong calls against teams per week in %
Week	Arsenal	Man U	Chelsea	Man City	Liverpool	Tottenham
1	84,21	20	57,14	20	25
2	66,67	38,46	20	84,62	33,33	61,54

And then you have the exceptions. In those two games Arsenal has  always been hit hard by wrong calls. It doesn’t matter if we are at home or not. We get the majority of the wrong calls given against us.

And you also have winners. And look. United can go away from home and get very few wrong calls going against them. And another team that gets few wrong calls going against them is Liverpool. Now it could be that this is a coincidence because their away game was at Arsenal and so they just benefited from that. But it will be interesting to see how this table develops during the season.

Oh and just as we have covered WBA twice in those opening weeks I can also give you a bit of their wrong score table. And it is very easy because both in their game against United as against Chelsea they were on the wrong end of the wrong calls. In both games they got 80% of the calls going against them. Well a little team against the big boys….

We also will keep the records of those smaller teams as the season goes further. So we could see if there is just a big/small team bias or if there are other things at work in the ref his mind.

So much more to look forward to I guess….