West Midlands referee Oliver Langford will be the man in the middle tomorrow afternoon at Derby and we can only hope it is his best performance yet while refereeing Burnley after previous games against Doncaster and Barnsley.

In those two previous games he's turned in dreadful performances. He's missed most of what was going in and such were his performances that on both occasions he's collected a score in the mid-30s on RATE THE REF and is currently down in 57th place out of 59 with a rating of just 35.67.

At Doncaster he missed the most obvious things but probably his best decision was in allowing a player to take a free kick to himself and then go on a run. In the home game against Barnsley there were so many poor decisions including the booking of Chris McCann for diving when he was clearly brought down in the box. McCann looked staggered; all the ground, Langford apart, looked staggered.

But in both games it wasn't a case of one or two big decisions being incorrect. He got little right in either of the games with both sets of supporters in both games questioning whether he knew what he was doing.

This season is his fifth as a Football League referee. He got his first Championship game in the second of those seasons and last season refereed fourteen Championship games. However, he still operates mainly in the two lower divisions.

He's not a particularly card happy referee and that's certainly shown this season again when, in seven games, he's kept clean sheets. In the four other games there have been just seven yellow cards and one red card when he dismissed Southend's Michael Timlin in their 2-0 defeat at Oxford.

Of the yellow cards, three have gone to home team players and four to away team players. There was just one of those cards in his last game, and that was the League One game between Bournemouth and Brentford on Tuesday that ended in a 2-2 draw. Tony Craig of Brentford was the only player carded.

We can only hope he turns in a better performance tomorrow than he's done in his two previous Burnley games. One thing is for certain, it won't be a worse performance.

The assistant referees are Robert Merchant (Staffordshire) and Nick Hobbis (West Midlands). The fourth official is Nigel Smith (Derbyshire).

Previous Burnley Games

Season Opponents V Res Y R Burnley Players Carded
             
2010/11 Doncaster Rovers a 0-1 2 0 n Fox
2011/12 Barnsley h 2-0 2 0 n McCann, Duff