Untold ref Review: Stoke – Arsenal, the Anthony Taylor horror show. “Shockingly bad”.

Ref (or whatever you want to call him) on the day was Anthony Taylor

As most of you will never look back at the match in full and I can understand that but as a reviewer we have the hard task to do this. Mostly it is fun but not this time. As a referee I was shocked to see how Taylor tilted the pitch in the most obscene ways. Not even subtle at times and shockingly bad.

The match started with a foul every minute almost. And as another ref said after the match, after 5 minutes I knew that he was out to do Arsenal. The foul on Alexis that was turned in to a foul from Alexis was not even subtle. It was punching the Arsenal players in the face and saying, “I will screw you today.” And so he did for the rest of the match.

Crouch performing martial arts against chambers on a football field without getting a yellow card, then punching Mertesacker in the face twice and only then getting a yellow card. And then he had the guts to send off Chambers for what were in itself not worthy of a yellow card in 99,9% of the matches and certainly not in this one when he allowed Stoke players to manhandle Arsenal players like they did.

The Aston Villa match from last season all over again with giving all and everything against Arsenal when he could and even when he couldn’t he still did it.

And for those who point at the disallowed goal from Stoke and the penalty given to Arsenal this was only the result of their assistants making the calls. I wonder if those assistants had enough of the one-sidedness of the referee in the middle and if they were trying to bring some balance in to the match. I have had this once as an assistant when I saw a blatantly biased ref doing a terrible job in the Taylor way and after a while you can have this reaction and the other assistant told me after the match he also tried to correct the ref whenever he could and tried to add some balance.

I would have refused to do another match ever again if I had been appointed with that ref but for the welfare of refereeing he stopped half a year later as a ref.

The ref could have saved his face if he had sent off Adams for one of the most terrible fouls I have seen on a football field when Adams tried to separate the head of Alexis from his body.

But he refused to do this and so we can only come to the conclusion that he is unfit to referee an Arsenal match or even a PL match over all. Mr. Riley do we really have to see again limbs hanging off bodies before you will act?

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Let us look at the scores. And because of all the fouls he could even muster a reasonable score of 68% in total. If we put weight on the decisions it drops to 59%. Too low.

And if we only look at the important decisions we get a score of only 34% correct decisions. That is terrible. Unacceptably low.

I challenge you, Howard Webb to show us the numbers from the PGMO from this match. But I bet you wouldn’t even dare to send them to me in private even when I would promise to not use them. Because your number of 98% correct decisions is false. Completely fabricated.

The bias numbers from Taylor in this match. 22 wrong decisions in total. 11 important one (yellow and red cards, goals and penalties) and 11 not that important one.

And all 22 wrong decisions were against Arsenal. All of them.

As our previewer said before the match: “The man makes Dean look an Arsenal Supporter ” and my boy he was spot on. I must admit that I have seen horrendous matches from Dean against Arsenal but for the moment Taylor makes Dean look like a choir boy and an innocent child born on Christmas day when it comes to bias against Arsenal.

Another disgraceful performance as predicted by Untold before the match and as it came out from the preview after the match.

This was the most terrible and one sided refereeing performance I have seen against Arsenal. And I have seen a lot of them. Too many to be good.

ps: sorry as the review is almost double the length of a regular review the page may load slowly. Blame Taylor for that please. The better the refs are the shorter the review.

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