Untold Ref Review: MU 2 – Norwich 0 « Untold Arsenal: Arsenal News. Supporting the Lord Wenger; coach of the decade

By Ref Reviewer 03

If you are new to this series you might like to see the note at the foot of the article

For the game Manchester United – Norwich we reviewed ref Stuart Attwell. How was his score?

Atwell scored very poorly in the 1st half, rather well in the 2nd half, but overall had a poor score of 61%.  Incorrect decisions favoured Manchester United by a 9 to 4 margin though there really wasn’t anything too controversial in these decisions.

For example, in the first half, Chicharito was often interfering with the Norwich keeper from corner kicks and getting away with it, and although Manchester opened the scoring from a corner kick halfway through the 2nd half, the goal was scored legitimately.  Note that Chicharito had been substituted two or three minutes earlier.

There were also two instances of a Manchester United player throwing himself to ground in the area and appealing for a penalty, Fletcher in the 1st half, and Rooney in the 2nd half, both of whom should have been booked for simulation.  However in both cases the ref didn’t fall for it, nor were Fletcher or Rooney guilty of any other bookable offenses in the match.

Regarding the correct calls, Norwich received 18 correct decisions compared to Manchester’s 8, indicating that Norwich was on the receiving end of more fouls in addition to the fact that United was whistled 6 times for offside compared to just once for Norwich.  While neither side was dirty, except for maybe one tackle by Welbeck for which he was booked, Norwich played a relatively clean match with little fouling and were perhaps unfortunate not to come away with a point as they spurned several good scoring chances.

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Background: Initially Untold Arsenal started to publish referee reviews of Arsenal matches, and through this we found some evidence of what appeared to be consistent bias by referees against Arsenal.  The point was then made we would get a better overall picture of what is going on if we also analysed errors made by referees in non-Arsenal EPL games as well.

This site records our findings.  A summary of our position from the point of view of evidence is given here.…

Untold Referees is written by a team who draw together their reports on how referees have performed in various matches, based on TV reporting of games.  We use the TV since it allows us to check and re-check decisions – but we are at the mercy of the TV stations which don’t always show each and every decision.  If you would like to contribute to the work of the panel please do get in touch with us via WalterBroeckx@hotmail.com