The Untold weekly ref review « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Walter Broeckx

Well we have had our first week of ref reviews. And apart from some mistakes that were made while publishing a review your original ref reviewer is feeling a bit satisfied.  Not all that came online this week was 100%. But this is the building process. And as Rome wasn’t build in a day, let alone in a week also Untold Ref Review edition 2 will need time some to build it in to the perfect product we would like it to be. So for anything that went wrong this week, please consider this is a starting work and a job in progress. And I take the blame for those mistakes: I wrote the song, don’t shoot the piano player (ref reviewer).

So in short what will we be trying to do in this season. First of all the basic stuff. The ref reviews themselves. I would say the most important part of it. And I find myself lucky that I have a small team of ref reviewers at my disposal. If there are other refs around who want to join them please contact us. The more people on board the better our work can become. And I also would like to encourage readers who are refs but who support other teams and who came here because they saw the name of the team they follow or support to join us.

So this first weekend we managed to have 5 reviews from the EPL games. And we could include Arsenal, Utd, City, Chelsea and Liverpool. And of course we also have some numbers of the other teams involved. So if we can keep this up we will have a lot of data at the end of the season. And we will be able to have not only the top 5 or 6 covered but also have 10 or 12 games covered from the smaller teams.

In another article I have given a look at possible things we could do with the data. Like seeing if there is a player that is fouled a lot. If there is a player that commits a lot of fouls. If there is a player that makes a lot of fouls but that aren’t given by the ref or refs. Some kind of player bias by the refs. But you could also see if you can find the opposite. A player that is being penalised for doing nothing wrong. And this also can have something to do with some kind of anti-player bias from some refs.

You could try to look for trends. I’m not suggesting anything but if we for example find that refs punish red haired players more than blond players we can assume that the ref or refs in question don’t like red haired players. To answer to the why question is not that simple if we find such data but we will certainly try to keep an eye on this and report if we notice something unusual.

Another thing I will be trying to do is analyse the refs each week. With the data gathered from the games I will try to point at things that become visible when looking at the numbers. And I will try to compare this with other weeks and so we can try to build this up and see if we can find trends. Trends not only in Arsenal games but also in other games. Trends we can see from certain refs. But as this is new territory I don’t know what we will find at the end of the week, month or season.

To show you what I mean I will try to do this with the first games we have done this week. I know it doesn’t contain a lot of data yet but we can only work with the things we have for the moment and that is 5 games.

And the first thing I will show you is the overall score table from these games

Ref	Important	Overall	Weight	Average
Dean	77,78	80	83,72	80,5
Halsey	57,14	65	64,56	62,23
Dowd	83,33	89,13	91,53	88,00
Jones	80	79,59	82,26	80,62
Walton	50	55	63,16	56,05
Av week 1	69,65	73,744	77,046	73,48

The overall score of all the refs is 73.48 % and this is enough to stay in the league. But there are some differences because 2 refs didn’t make the 70% score. 3 did make more than 70%. But this is only from one week so not really to say much about it.

But what I can do is to see if there are any differences between the first half numbers and the second half numbers and see if there a trend hidden in the numbers. So the first half score for the same games is

Ref	Important	Overall	Weight	Average
Dean	50	90	91,67	77,22
Halsey	83,33	76,92	78,13	79,46
Dowd	80	91,67	87,88	86,52
Jones	100	85	88,89	91,30
Walton	80	70	70,83	73,61
Av week 1	78,67	82,72	83,48	81,62

And when there is a first half there is also a second half score table :

Ref	Important	Overall	Weight	Average
Dean	85,71	75	80,65	80,45
Halsey	46,15	55,88	55,32	52,45
Dowd	100	86,36	96,15	94,17
Jones	77,78	75,86	77,14	76,93
Walton	41,18	57,58	59,62	52,79
Av week 1	70,16	70,14	73,78	71,36

Now this is only based on one game for each ref so it is difficult to draw any definite conclusions on this. But nevertheless I will try to do it so we can see later on that what I said now will actually be confirmed or not.

All the refs have a better first half than a second half, apart from Dowd. There is a 10% gap between the first half and the second half for most of the decisions. Now this is in fact a normal thing because the ref is the person who has to cover the whole field during the whole game. And so he will be more tired as the game goes on. And the more tired you are the more your decisions will suffer.

This is a well know fact by all the refs. And this is also the reason that Fifa and Uefa and many countries have the rule that a top class ref should be maximum 45 years old. Now I have passed that age a few years ago and I think most of us who did will have felt that well things do come down a bit around that age. This summer I have been training harder and longer than ever before and I can say that for my age I am in a really good condition (I flirt with the notion excellent at the cooper test) but it cost me a lot more trouble and pain than let us say 10 years ago. So the first game week shows that this is the same for most refs: the later on in the game the more the decisions suffer.

Another statistical fact we will be watching is the wrong calls. Because these things can hide something as most us know right now. And we will be having a look at how many calls were wrong and most of all how they were divided between the two teams. Because making mistakes can happen. But making the same mistakes all over again against one team and not against the other is something that could point at something suspicious. So here is the statistic for this week

Wrong calls against	Nr	%
Arsenal	16	84,21%
Newcastle	3	15,79%
Game total	19
Man City	1	20,00%
Swansea	4	80,00%
Game total	5
Chelsea	12	57,14%
Stoke	9	42,86%
Game total	21
MU	2	20,00%
WBA	8	80,00%
Game total	10
Liverpool	1	25,00%
Sunderland	3	75,00%
Total	3

Now I don’t want to go in to this too much for the moment as well this is only after one game but I think it will be very interesting to also keep a close watch on to these numbers.

Later in the season I will certainly come back to this and we will also be monitoring possible game changing decisions. And how much points it could have cost a team. But that is something for the future.