Sunday, October 30th, 2011 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx

This is part 2 of a early season review. The first article can be found here

LET’S COMPARE ARSENAL GAMES WITH THE OTHER TEAM MATCHES

Last year some of our readers said that we should review the other games also to be able to see how things are in the whole PL. So as you know we took these words with us and started doing this. So we do the games that we can see and that are available for us via TV.

So far we have done 29 games of other teams. Mostly top teams but when the occasion passes by we also take on the little ones.

And so I have the same numbers as we had for the Arsenal games for the other teams and again we put them in a nice graphic presentation.  And to make things easy for our readers we have added something else. Because one of the reasons we have gone through all this trouble in reviewing the games was to compare it with the Arsenal games. And so we have our first measurement after 9 Arsenal games and 38 games in total so far this season.

So here it is…..

So the higher the number, the better the decisions were. And then we see that when it comes to yellow cards those have been more correct in Arsenal games than in the other games. And the same goes for the red cards in fact. So apart from the fact that the scores in those categories are ridiculously low we can’t complain that much. In fact I do complain about the low numbers of correct decisions.

Let’s take a look at the penalty decisions and then you can see that well suddenly in Arsenal games it seems that the refs somehow throw something out of the window. Could that be a pair of eyes I see flying? Could that be the rulebook I see passing by? Could it be that they are scared of something? Because how on earth can you go from the already faaar tooooooo looooooow 65% of correct penalty decisions to only 36% in Arsenal games?

And also in the goal decisions you get a drop of 5% in Arsenal games of correct allowed or disallowed goals. Penalties and goals are much lower in Arsenal games than in other games. Coincidence?

Also the other decisions there is a rather big gap between the other games and Arsenal games. And so it is not really a big surprise that when it comes to important decisions that in the other games it still is at an unacceptable low level but in the Arsenal games it is even lower.

The same goes for the offside decisions. Now really tell me are there two different rule books? One for Arsenal games and one for the other games?

And so the story goes on with the overall decisions and the weight decisions in which other teams suffer from less bad refereeing than Arsenal does.

So the total average of all averages leads to a difference of some 5%. This means that in Arsenal games the refs suddenly drop 5% compared to doing other games.

Why? Well I wished I could give you the answer. I could guess. I could think of some answers. But what really is happening is something that we just don’t know for now.

But what we can see from these numbers is that there is something terribly wrong in the EPL when it comes to what the refs are doing.

The scores are too low to my liking. And certainly for the important decisions this is something that has to improve. Because if the refs can’t get the important decisions right then what are they doing here? Is the game getting too fast to ref it in a correct way? Are the refs not good enough? Is there any bias? Is there a dark force behind the scenes? It could be a bit of all those things together but it has to come to an end. The PGMOL must do something about it and make sure that the refs do their job better.

And yes the refs can do a better job. Because in some games that we have done this season the refs have managed high scores. A top ref can have a bad day. he could even have 2 bad days. But a real top ref will have more good than bad days. A real top ref will have more games in the +80% area than below that score. So it will be interesting to see how many refs are real top refs in the EPL this season. But that is something for another day, week or month. Because first we have to gather more data on this.  So stay tuned (if we recover completely from our cyber attack) for more later in the season.

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Untold Arsenal – the (fairly) complete index