The problem is that the league outsourced the provision of and, more importantly, performance assessment, of referees to the PGMOL. It's a virtual closed shop now, and you can suck week after week without being concerned about demotion. It was Mike Dean (I think) who got demoted after a game littered with horrendous decisions, spent one game in the Championship where his performance was littered with horrendous decisions, and was reinstated to the Premiership thereafter.

There is no accountability, so there will never be any demand for improvement, let alone actual improvement, in refereeing standards.

Oh, and Mike Dean is our ref for Saturday.

We don't do possession; we do defense and attack. Everything else is just wa**ing with a football.

Is that the same Mike Dean that didn't get near a Stoke game for over a year after they formally complained about his incompetence & possible bias against them?

Will this be five? It's gonna be five! It IS five!

Where does Willo's figure of 98% come from? Maybe here:

[Link]

where it says this:

"In total, refs make around five errors per game, meaning they are right 98 per cent of the time."

What's the source of the figures? PGMOL. So not exactly impartial.

How many of the 245 decisions (average) per match are actually important, in that if the ref gets them wrong they could have serious consequences? Well, considering our last match 5% (12) of them seems conservative.

That means you've got a 5 x 5% chance of any given game being buggered up by a s*** decision. 25%. Not good enough IMHO. (Strictly speaking I think you're supposed to use Bayesian calculus for this, because of course you could get 2 or more bad "big" decisions in a game. But it's of this kind of order, if my assumption be deemed reasonable). Also you might reasonably argue that a decision like that is less critical if the score is 3 - 0 with ten minutes left (pace Gayle et al. v. Liverpool) than if it is 2 - 2 at half time.

But ref performances are not just about individual decisions but about management of the game and the players and about being seen to be impartial. How often have we seen referees effectively prevent Zaha from playing by allowing opponents to gang up on him and throw him off the pitch? What about the kind of inconsistency we saw in awarding penalties and showing yellow cards on Saturday there? And what about the messages patterns of decision making send to teams ("Dear Mr Rooney, don't worry about Palace players getting away from you when you foul them because I had a cosy chat with Sir Alex there and I'm not going to play the advantage but will bring them back for a free kick so that you can get all your men back behind the ball. Just don't do it in the box or I may have to emigrate to Saudi Arabia." ). Then there are the decisions they bottle - people like Rooney put them under pressure, they are face to face with a big name like Ibrahimovic or de Bruyne or Pogba, and they can't take the decision that will pi** him off and "spoil the game".

None of that is addressed by the statistics but it's the sort of s*** we see every week and VAR won't deal with all of it. Someone made a very good point about the prejudices and unwritten rules that refs seem to follow ("Zaha is a diver", "Nobody gets sent off in the first dozen minutes", and so on) but VAR will only address the so-called "big" decisions. So that 25% may well improve, but that won't stop the ref being a t***.

Edited by chateauferret (22 Nov 2017 12.52am)

Edited by chateauferret (22 Nov 2017 12.55am)

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The Ferret
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