Whilst researching City’s referee for the home game against Barnsley, I noticed the amount of yellow and red cards some of the referees who are in charge of matches in the Championship have been dishing out.
Top of the heap and worryingly for the game is Darren Deadman, who in 36 matches, has shown a staggering 160 yellow cards and eleven red, two of which were in City’s game against Leicester City on the opening day of this season.
Now if Soccerbase can be deemed as an accurate source of information when it comes to statistics for referees, then Mr Deadman has shown nearly fifty more yellow cards than World Cup referee Howard Webb (113 yellows in 32 matches), Graham Scott (109 in 30 matches) and Keith Stroud (100 in 30 matches).
Allowing for the fact that Mr Deadman has had more matches than any other referee who has taken charge of a Championship game this season between three and five more), one still has to question the high number of cards issued in his matches.
The City V Leicester game showed that he was prepared to use his cards as a means of control rather than a commonsense approach of talking to the players and cooling things down in what was a highly charged atmosphere and by reading just some of the complaints about him on sites like Rate The Ref, fans from other clubs have been left feeling aggrieved by his performance.
The referee’s job is a hard one. However, they are paid good money, plus travel etc out of our admission money and for that money, it is only right that we expect the same sort of professionalism that we do from the players from every referee that takes charge of a Football League match.