I am doing an interesting experiment – I’m writing a blog about the Aviva Premiership Final, held on 31st May, without having watched the match, and not knowing a lot about rugby!
Generally, many of the tweets were mentioning what a tight game it was so I thought I’d test peoples reaction on Twitter to the referee. I used ‘referee’ as a search term and Blurrt collected 55 tweets mentioning referee in the context of the Premiership Final. At approximately 16:30 a controversial decision was taken by the referee J.P Doyle to award a try to Saracens. According to the tweets, whilst a conversion was being lined up, the try was being replayed on the overhead screens. Then the try was overturned by the TMO.
The question is how good was the refereeing during the final and did he call it right on the night? These are the results for ‘referee’ looking at average sentiment expressed with +5 being really positive and -5 being really negative.
There were 55 tweets during the match mentioning ‘referee’, 18% positive and 36% negative and the rest neutral. All of these tweets were in the context of Saracens and the Premiership Final and none mentioned Northampton (or All Saints). Clearly, the Saracen fans felt more aggrieved and used Twitter to push their negative feelings out.
Referee made some questionable decisions, especially going to tv ref after awarding the try! Absolutely cracking game though #AvivaPremFinal
— Ben Rayner (@benjaminraynerr) May 31, 2014
#PremiershipFinal Soccer players – note the behaviour of the defeated Saracens players. Not a hint of abuse to the referee after decision — Marcher Lord (@MarcherLord1) May 31, 2014
Searching in Blurrt for the term ‘TMO’ we can see that out of a total of 287 tweets, the average sentiment is high with 42% positive and 20% negative.
Unlucky Saracens, don’t think it was a try but to be fair the Saints probably deserved to win it overall, great atmosphere as well #bbcrugby
— Dan Reuben (@DanReuben18) May 31, 2014
Putting all these tweets about the referee and TMO into context – the negative feelings expressed are a very small share of the 11.66k tweets about the game as a whole. The conclusion, according to the Twitter data collected by Blurrt, is that the referee and the TMO did a good job on the day.
Overall sentiment for the match was very good, especially for Northampton Saints which had a very high 52% positive tweets. A capacity stadium of 40,000+ happy customers.