ARSENAL V TOTTENHAM WITH CLUBS NOW GETTING MORE CARDS THAN THEY PUT IN TACKLES!

The referee of the match between Arsenal and Tottenham is Rob Jones. The assistants were Lee Betts and Wade Smith, with the fourth referee being Michael Salisbury. Paul Tierney joins VAR and Harry Lennard assists.

For once, this could be a good move for Arsenal as Mr Jones has played five games this season and none of them have been away wins. Three wins at home and two draws. Understanding his bias further (and remember that when it comes to home and away results), most referees still show a clear bias due to crowd behavior – see Many of our articles demonstrate this over time – for example here – or see the recorded log of the data).

As we can see, when looking at the referees who oversaw 25 or more matches last season in the Premier League, home win rates varied widely.

A range of home wins from 72% down to 33.3% is crazy and can only be explained (at least thus far) by how much the referee is influenced by the crowd.

Now we know that Arsenal’s home crowd has been very positive this season, and certainly on Wednesday the crowd was utterly alight and supportive of the team at every move.   So given the referee’s propensity for home wins, we should be ok.  Anthony Taylor on the other hand would of course be most welcome at the Unsponsored Tottenham Staduim for the return match.

Tottenham have been firing on most if not all cylinders this season

… and they have 13 goals to Arsenal’s nine, and conceded five to Arsenal’s four.  Of course, they are not playing in Europe this season, and sometimes one might argue that they have a benefit from that, although I suspect at this stage of the season, Arsenal will have the benefit of such a fine performance and win in mid-week, while Tottenham were presumably either watching TV or down the pub.  Or something.

But let us now have a look at the negative issues: tackles, fouls and yellow cards

Now you’ll know if you’ve been reading Untold for a few years that the first thing Arteta did when he arrived at Arsenal as manager was halve the total number of yellow cards by reducing the number of tackles, and since then , the number of tackles remains low. level. level. In fact, this season Tottenham have made 33% more tackles than Arsenal!

However, their foul rate is only 20% higher than Arsenal’s but their yellow card rate is 280% higher than Arsenal’s. Arsenal actually had the least number of yellow cards, except (of course, as always) Manchester City, who had less than one.

So let’s see how the referees are working this…

As goal gleefully tells us, “The 13 bookings in Tottenham’s win over Sheffield United set a new Premier League record for most yellow cards in a single game.”  But perhaps we should not be too surprised, for after all last season Richarlison received more yellow cards for celebrating goals than he has actually scored.  How very Tottenham!

The Tottenham and Newcastle figures showing more yellow cards than tackles are bonkers, and really the clubs ought to sort their relationship with PGMO out.  Arsenal faced a similar attack from PGMO in Arteta’s first year at the club, and sank down to 15th in the league while changing their style of play to accommodate the referees.  Mind you, I only mention this because Tottenham won’t take any notice, and I suspect most Tottenham fans won’t believe it.

But if they want to make progress they are going to have to note how PGMO run things, and change their style accordingly as Arsenal and Manchester City before them, have done.  Here’s the league table…

Tottenham are of course be above Arsenal by two places in the league with a +3 better goal difference but I suspect they are going to run into trouble if they don’t start acknowledging PGMO manipulations in the way that Arsenal did.   As for Newcastle, we’ll leave that for another day.