Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Walking in a Winter Wonderland

Excuse the title, but I'm actually referring to Jeff Winter. For those of you that don't know him - he's an ex Premiership referee, who remains quite a high profile as a columnist and general outspoken individual!

Now I'm by no means Jeff Winters' biggest fan (as I understand he reserves that pleasure for himself), but he has been running quite an interesting experiment on his own website - 'The League of Injustice'

www.jeffwinterentertainmentandmedia.co.uk

Mr Winter reviews the controversial refereeing decisions in each game, every weekend, and he concludes what should have occurred (given the benefit of tv replays, and a hell of a lot more time that the actual refs get to ponder the outcomes). If the refereeing outcome was wrong, and would have altered the outcome of the game, then he adjusts for it. The results are quite interesting:

Pos Team P GD Pts Actual League Pos
1 Man Utd 21 24 47 1
2 Chelsea 22 26 46 3
3 Liverpool 22 19 44 2
4 Aston Villa 22 13 43 4
5 Arsenal 22 9 38 5
6 Everton 22 5 37 6

So the main beneficiaries of 'dodgy' refereeing decisions thus far to date appear to be our beloved Scouser friends, who (according to Jeff) have actually garnered 3 more points than they actually should have done for such iffy decisions going their way (sounds familiar to most Villa fans!). They are also 1 place higher than they 'should be'.

Chelsea would actually have 1 more point than they have now, and would be one place higher in the table, at the expense of Liverpool.

For the rest of the top 6 teams, the positions would remain the same, however Villa should actually be 5 points ahead of Arsenal, rather than just the 3 points. Arsenal clearly having picked up 3 points somewhere that they 'shouldn't' have got if the referee in their games had gotten the decisions right.

Just thought it made interesting reading, and also rather puts into perspective all of this talk about Villa getting the rub of all of the decisions lately, 'dodgy penalties', etc. It appears we may have 'nicked' a point somewhere that we didn't actually deserve, but it makes pretty much zero difference to the look of the Premiership table. If anything, we'd be sitting a lot prettier in 4th place in this 'ideal' scenario.

So we are where we deserve to be. Let's enjoy it whilst it lasts, and pray to the Great Lord McGrath that it does, in fact, last.

Amen Villans.

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