In an attempt to minimise RSI I’m reducing the page to the poll and little more. I’ll set up a summary for next weekend’s break.
refereeing decisions
Rate the ref: Sunderland v Luton Town
The 223 posts have been put in the spreadsheet. (Mr Probert didn’t score very well).
The poll has been removed as it’s being set up for the next game. Comments are below for you to read and add to:
Rate the Ref: Sunderland v Bradford City
Some of those 42 may have been Portsmouth fans, judging by the range of ratings. It was the first time the full scale was used, which means some people thought the ref was absolute perfection while others thought he was, in Ken’s words, Coote-like (or in plain English, abysmal)
Arsenal and bias. Is this the untold story?
It just happened that when M Salut https://safc.blog/?p=46095 was passing on “Untold Arsenal’s findings about referees being biased against Arsenal and towards Sunderland I was dipping into “The future of football: Challenges for the twenty-first century” (Garland et al, 2003). Its final chapter discusses refereeing and its author, Sharon Colwell, should know her onions as she completed a PhD on elite refereeing in 2004.
How Dare We? SAFC lucky with refs or Untold Arsenal just bonkers?
OK, Untold Arsenal freely acknowledges that it reports on football “from an Arsenal perspective”. Just as we all recall instances of crass refereeing decisions against us in encounters between our clubs, Gooners assume victimhood from other occasions.
But this Arsenal site is trying to persuade readers that Sunderland did rather well out of match officials’ wrong decisions last season.
That is an acceptable argument, even if analysis of the 19 games they didn’t scrutinise might well reveal a different story. What was just a bit rich was the suggestion that pro-Sunderland bias on the part of refs and/or their assistants could lie behind the scoring. We probably need to let John McCormick loose on them (PS: we did and it’s at https://safc.blog/2013/08/the-north-south-divide-long-may-it-continue/ …