Do You Need A Couple More Minutes?

22 September 09 by Bill

Almost everyone from within football seems to have an opinion on time keeping in football after Sunday’s derby day win over Man City. It sees the additional couple of minutes of stoppage time that was played by Martin Atkinson is a bit of a hotly contested topic. Given the simplicity of the reasoning behind the referee’s decision, I really don’t understand why we are still hearing about this.

Daniel Taylor from The Guardian has gone a step further however and ‘analysed’ all stoppage time played at Old Trafford since the beginning of the 2006/07 season. He has concluded “that the Premier League champions do, as suspected, benefit from an imbalance in the amount of stoppage time that is added to their matches.”

He backs it up by stating that when United were losing or drawing, an average of 257.17 seconds were played compared to 191.35 seconds when they were winning. Bearing in mind of the 60 games they looked at, there was a pool of just 12 games in which United were not winning; hardly a big enough number to draw any meaningful statistics. Still they try.

If you look back into these 12 games in which the ref supposedly did us a favour, you’ll notice they include games like last season’s nil nil draw with Arsenal or the nil nil against Everton. Games with a combined sum of ten yellow cards and no less than 70 fouls. The 3 – 2 win over Aston Villa where Macheda scored his last minute winner; a game with three second half goals.

Similarly, there were five goals, five yellows, one sending off, a penalty and 30 fouls in our humiliating 4 – 1 defeat to Liverpool last season and yet you wonder why there was a bit of extra stoppage time?

What Daniel did bring to light was that of the ‘big four’, it is United who played the least stoppage time at home. Indeed Liverpool, Chelsea and Arsenal were all given more with average times coming in at 205 seconds for United, 210 for Liverpool, 224 for Arsenal and 229 for Chelsea.