Rate the Ref: And the worst by far is….

MONSIEUR SALUT writes: the series has been an interesting exercise but will now be discontinued for the reasons set out below. Our thanks to Ken Gambles for the idea and Salut! Sunderland’s associate editor John McCormick for making it work

John McCormick writes: I have to include a warning right from the outset. Some of the judgements below are dodgier than even the dodgiest of McCormick’s dodgy numbers. The arithmetic’s correct, as always, and I removed the Accrington ratings because of the abandonment, but some games – away games especially – had low numbers of responses and that brings into question the reliability of our findings. For example, removing the one person who gave Craig Hicks (Scunthorpe Utd away) a Coote-like 1 would have increased the rating for that particular ref from 6.14 to 6.54.

A couple of refs got responses into the low hundreds, which you might think would improve reliability.

Well, it might. But this is football, and we are biased. So you might guess what happens when the referee in the most critical game of the ten we have rated, and a home game with a large crowd at that, decides to make one or two strange decisions such as awarding a penalty and a red card against us. We get the largest turnout of the series and the lowest rating by far, although Mr Coote himself may have done worse had he actually been given a rating rather than the place of honour in the scale Ken Gambles devised for us and which I have faithfully reproduced below:

10 Absolute perfection. Class throughout
9 Not perfect, but difficult to expect more of an official
8 Generally very good. In control, let the game flow
7 Good. Would be satisfied with this standard for every game.
6 Decent. Nothing hugely wrong though guilty of some dubious decision-making
5 Barely adequate. Obvious weaknesses
4 Disappointing. Got more wrong than right
3 Poor decisions at important moments that affected the game’s outcome
2 Incompetent, lost control, ruined game
1 Coote-like (the ref for the Peterborough game). Enough said. Abysmal

Ken Gambles: let’s hear it for – and against – the man with the whistle

Mr Lee Probert, for ’tis he, scored 1.91 on the K-meter, compared to between 4.44 – 6.68 (average 5.21) for the  the others.

Here are the results in full:

Take a bow, Mr. Probert, but please don’t take any more of our games.

 

5 thoughts on “Rate the Ref: And the worst by far is….”

  1. To repeat the note I have added above:

    MONSIEUR SALUT writes: the series has been an interesting exercise but will now be discontinued for the reasons set out (ABOVE). Our thanks to Ken Gambles for the idea and Salut! Sunderland’s associate editor John McCormick for making it work

  2. I like this idea, specially in a season when ref standards have plummeted even further and is led by a Premiership Ref.

    Refs & officials never have to explain their performance, this is a good way for fans to voice there opinion.

    However, does the final score have an influence on the ref rating?

  3. Thanks to John for his input and curation of the idea. It was meant to be a bit of fun albeit with an opportunity to comment on some of the atrocious refereeig we saw early in the season. Bias is clearly a big factor but recent scorings (Probert excepted)suggest that the standard is not too bad after all.

    • Two things confuse me more than any others these days.

      The first is the interpretation of when a player is deemed offside. You often see players who have been offside make a determined effort to get back onside, then when they receive the ball the flag goes up and the linesman makes a crossing signal.

      Now I can understand it if the ball is passed before the player gets back onside, but sometimes it seems like they have been onside for ages and they still get flagged.Against The Mags’ Bairns Chris Maguire was given offside when he was in his own half.

      On Tuesday, twice the ball was played out to Duncan Watmore, who ran past his marker when the ball was in flight and he was flagged, though clearly onside when the pass was made. I can understand that more easily as perhaps the official is too close to the play to see where the player is when the ball is kicked and reacts to what he/she sees when they turn their heads but it is still frustrating.

      The second thing that frustrates me is why defenders seem to get away with shirt pulling, holding onto players and pushing attackers as the ball arrives, yet forward players often seem to get penalised for the slightest thing.

      Chris Maguire’s booking against Oxford is a good example. Again on Tuesday O’Nien was penalised for jumping and Gooch for supposedly backing into a defender whilst blocking, pushing and pulling went unpunished.

      And the ref missed two clear hand balls. Despite all that I thought he had a decent game.

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