It is a classic sporting assumption, that having an extra day's rest gives a team an advantage particularly in a competition as fiercely contested as the Gallagher Premiership.
To answer the question I've looked at Premiership rugby matches for the eight complete seasons Exeter Chiefs have been in there (i.e. 2010-11 to 2017-18). Predominantly I've looked at fixtures where there has been a one week turnaround from the previous premiership fixtures.
The perception would be that having more rest between matches would be an advantage. But is this borne out in the data?
Lets start by looking at how the result is affected:
So home teams have the best win rate when they've a days less rest and the worst win rate when both sides have had the same amount of rest. However the win percentage of away teams peaks at 6 days rest, suggesting the rest period for an away side may not be as important.
However clearly there is more to it that just one teams rest period, so lets have a look at how the difference in rest periods might influence the result of a game.....
Somewhat unexpectedly the highest win rate for home teams is after the away team have had an extra day's rest, and
In short the advantage of an extra days rest is debatable when considered on its own. Of course there will be other factors at play, for example the relative quality of the opposition and the sides which are most likely to play Friday night home games and thus play away games with an extra days rest.
But how much of a difference does an extra days rest make?
To answer the question I've looked at Premiership rugby matches for the eight complete seasons Exeter Chiefs have been in there (i.e. 2010-11 to 2017-18). Predominantly I've looked at fixtures where there has been a one week turnaround from the previous premiership fixtures.
The perception would be that having more rest between matches would be an advantage. But is this borne out in the data?
Lets start by looking at how the result is affected:
So home teams have the best win rate when they've a days less rest and the worst win rate when both sides have had the same amount of rest. However the win percentage of away teams peaks at 6 days rest, suggesting the rest period for an away side may not be as important.
However clearly there is more to it that just one teams rest period, so lets have a look at how the difference in rest periods might influence the result of a game.....
Somewhat unexpectedly the highest win rate for home teams is after the away team have had an extra day's rest, and
indeed almost 66% of the time when an away team has an extra days rest the home team wins, compared to just 61% when the home team has more rest between fixtures.This seems incredible given the fact and although we're talking about more than 200 games in both cases so we cant put this down to a small sample size it isn't quite statistically significant.
In short the advantage of an extra days rest is debatable when considered on its own. Of course there will be other factors at play, for example the relative quality of the opposition and the sides which are most likely to play Friday night home games and thus play away games with an extra days rest.
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