REFEREE REVIEW 2012: Anthony Taylor – something very curious is happening here

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This article is part of the series : REFEREE REVIEW 2012

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By DogFace and Walter Broeckx

Untold Arsenal has a team of qualified referees who have reviewed more than 40% of the EPL games from last season. The reviews themselves were based on full match video footage with the advantage of video technology features such as slow motion and pause.

By reviewing those 155 games we have made a database of more than 7000 decisions that have been judged by our panel of dedicated and qualified referees.

The numbers you will see are based on those decisions and those reviewed games.

The next ref in our series is ref Anthony Taylor. And he will be one of the refs that will be taken in account when we make up the referee league table later on in this series.



Anthony Taylor

We managed to do 5 games of him this season. And that was almost 28% of his games in the PL last season. Not really perfect but with lots of different teams reviewed it might be a bit more interesting than the refs we have done before.

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Let us see how his competence was in the games we reviewed.

Well that doesn’t look good. A score of only 67.80% correct decisions in the un-weighted graphic.

And also in the weight graphic he scores only 66.67%. That is on both occasion well under the 70% borderline. So not good at all.

Based on those games and on the rules that are applied in other countries this is a ref that could be in serious trouble and should be put back to the lower leagues.

If we compare this with the results we found from Attwell we see that these numbers are only slightly better than the ones from Attwell. Attwell was put back, Taylor not. It seems that they are working with different measure sticks at the PGMOL.

Let us see at the different decisions.

Only just above 90% of the goals in these games were correct. Not really what we like to see. Certainly on the most important type of decisions.

The offside decisions are very low. Only 76%. Some might remember Riley claiming it was 99%?

The other decisions are rather low with 72% but just above the minimum that is required.

The penalty decisions are not good at all. 50% is not really what we want from a ref in the PL on such important decisions.

The red cards with only 25% correct is also not something that brings joy in the Untold referee review.

Just as the yellow cards don’t fill us with joy at all. Poor distribution of yellow cards.

Let us see how it looked on the home and away bias front.

Just as Stewart Attwell we see that this ref had a positive away bias in the un-weighted decisions. The result for the home teams is that they got in general a negative bias from this ref. Not a really big difference. This is showing that the ref is daring to stand up against the home crowd when he feels the need to do it. A sign of a strong character?

If we put weight on the decisions we see the same. A positive bias in favour of the away teams. Not really a big one but showing he can stand up against the home crowd.

Let us now see if we can see any differences if we look at the different teams.

What we can see is that from his moderate bias index of 1.6 some teams really are on the different side of things.

We could accept the numbers from Aston Villa, Blackburn and Manchester City as not that bad. But the negative bias against Manchester United, Sunderland and Arsenal are mind blowing. On the other hand the numbers from Wolverhampton, Liverpool and Norwich are very favourable.

The numbers of Manchester United and Wolverhampton were the result of a one sided game that was already decided in the first half after 3 goals and a sending off from a Wolves player. Then the ref tried to level things up a bit by giving a lot of wrong calls to Wolverhampton.

The Arsenal result is very bad and goes well over the normal bias they had to face.

If we put weight on the decisions we see that most of the numbers stay a bit in the same region. There are 3 numbers that really stand out for me.

The number from Blackburn has gone up big time. As did the numbers from Arsenal. The negative bias from this ref is too big to be good when you put weight on the decisions.

And now we notice a bit of a strange thing in fact. Because in both of the games we had a big negative bias against Blackburn and Arsenal it was Norwich that was the other team.

And I remember Blackburn really being screwed by the ref in that game when he gave them fouls and even a laughable penalty in the dying minutes to get Norwich a 3-3 final result.

And guess what in the game Arsenal – Norwich he also made a lot of mistakes in favour of Norwich and the final score also was 3-3. Some strange coincidences?

Or is this a referee who just likes Norwich a lot?

FINAL CONCLUSION

This ref has a bad competence score in general. With these numbers he should be put back to the lower leagues and prove he is worth his place in the PL with good results in that league before allowing him back in.

His numbers are almost as poor as those from Attwell who was put back. This shows that the PGMOL uses different measures for different referees. Of course with the PGMOL being a secretive organisation we don’t know the real way they work and we are left in the dark on this. But it sure doesn’t look like consistency from the PGMOL.

I also would urge the PGMOL, apart from opening up, to look at the relation between Taylor and Norwich. I don’t know what is the matter but there sure does seems to be something strange as we could see in the bias numbers.

Despite having a rather low bias number in total, the differences between the teams are rather big and that is something I don’t like to see. It sure seldom evens out when Taylor is the ref.

So big bias swings in favour of one team, a too low total competence score… We could ask ourselves the question if this ref based on the games we reviewed fit to be a referee in the PL?

Ordinary is Pointless

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