On reflection: Are referees prone to 'evening things up'

Referee Jon Moss drew some critical comments following the crazy game at the Etihad, not least from ex-referee Graham Poll, who claimed that his appointment, as an inexperienced official taking charge of arguably the biggest game of the weekend, was an error from Mike Riley, head of the Professional Game Match Officials Limited.

Moss’s decision to award City their first penalty after Frank Lampard collided with Erik Lamela looked generous, while in the second half, Martin Demichelis brought down Roberto Soldado, but it was outside the area. Bizarrely, Poll, writing for MailOnline, thought the first decision “was the worst decision of them all”, even though, “as there was contact, technically the penalty award was not wrong”.

If City thought Moss was ‘evening things up’ after his first penalty call (and he had awarded a second one against Spurs in the meantime, which Sergio Aguero had saved), they may have had a point. Two academic studies bear this out. ‘Sequential effects in important referee decisions: The case of penalties in soccer’, by Plessner and Betsch, shows that referees are more likely to award a second penalty in a game to the team that had already conceded one; this is backed up by Wolf Schwartz, who looked at 12,902 games from the Bundesliga. There were 441 matches in which more than one penalty was awarded – far more than the expected number – and in those matches, he concluded in another paper titled 'Compensating tendencies in penalty kick decisions of referees in professional football’, “there are considerably more matches in which each team is awarded one penalty than would be expected on the basis of independent penalty kick decisions”.

A third study, ‘Soccer Referee Decision-Making: ‘Shall I Blow the Whistle?’, published in June 2006, featured honest interviews from five experienced (but, sadly, anonymous) officials, who were asked questions that included: ‘Do you worry about making the wrong/unpopular decision? What affect does this have on you?’

One answer was particularly instructive: “If you used to make a bad decision against one team, it wasn’t necessarily putting it right, but I think it might just have played, in the next 50-50 situation, just to say right…Where perhaps it could have been one throw in the other way, but you’ve given the throw-in to the team that you just upset. Just to try and calm things down.” Obviously a penalty is more significant than a throw-in but the point remains.

Since the 2010-11 season, there have been 51 games which featured more than one penalty. Of those, seven saw the away team awarded two (or more) penalties – most recently when Liverpool beat West Ham away 2-1 (April 6, 2014) and Manchester United away 3-0 (March 16, 2014), a game in which Steven Gerrard missed one and scored two penalties.

Out of the 51, 23 games, which is 45 per cent, featured penalties awarded to both sides. The table below shows those 23 games, and the referees in charge. Mike Dean was in charge for four of those games, with Lee Mason and Michael Oliver for three of them.

Obviously there is plenty that we don't know about these games; the likelihood is that a team who has conceded a penalty will have fallen behind and therefore will be chasing the game in the case of the ‘second penalty’; or maybe, in the final analysis, there will have been no controversy about either penalty. And yet the time difference between each penalty award is interesting: in 10 of the 23 matches, or in 45 per cent of them, two penalties were awarded less than 15 minutes apart.

That was the case for Michael Oliver in the Stoke-Swansea game; his first penalty was for a Ryan Shawcross foul on Wilfried Bony before a corner kick was taken (five minutes after Peter Crouch thought he deserved a penalty). It came after a tussle in the box, the like of which happen before every set-piece.

Bony scored and eight minutes later, Oliver awarded Stoke a spot kick after what looked like a dive from Victor Moses. Indeed, Swansea coach Garry Monk can expect a disciplinary letter after his outburst: “It was an absolute disgusting decision from the referee in terms of the penalty against us," he said. "He is supposed to be a professional referee at the highest level. He's the only guy who thought it was a penalty. Everyone in the stadium was amazed. How he can't see it is a blatant dive is beyond me.

“He [Moses] should be ashamed of himself for diving like that. I would not be able to go home to my family and show my face, for me it is a disgrace. He should be punished heavily for that. If my player had done that he would not play in the next game.”

We will never know if Oliver was trying to level things up after the first penalty, and perhaps he doesn't even know himself. But where there is a controversial penalty awarded to one team, you if you see the opposing team try and claim a spot-kick of their own after that, the numbers are on their side.

One thing we are unlikely to see in the near future in the Premier League, though, is referees explaining themselves to the press after a game, which is a shame, and it turns out, a frustration to the refs as well.

Mark Halsey missed Wigan’s Callum McManaman’s dangerous challenge on Newcastle’s Massimo Haidara in March 2013, but he was not allowed to explain himself. “I would have loved to explain why I took a decision when I did,” he told the Daily Telegraph. “The amount of criticism we took which we could easily have deflected with a quick word after a match got worse every year. We were not allowed to speak to media. I have lost count of the number of times I was frustrated by that ruling.” Halsey is not the only one…

Ben Lyttleton - follow him on Twitter @benlyt