Skip to main content

2019/20 for Exeter Chiefs in the Gallagher Premiership (so far) - featuring some TREEMAPS!!!

With the Gallagher Premiership returning from its extended break due to the Coronavirus this weekend I've dusted off some player stats for the first 13 rounds of the 2019/20 season.

As part of moving from 'analyst of data' to 'Data Scientist' I used a new tool (or rather perfect slightly something I've been playing with for a while), I've been toying with the R package "treemapify" to make some visualisations for a few months now and thought this might be a good use for them. 

Treemaps are very simple - the bigger the area the bigger the proportion of a total made up by that element. 

I think Rob Baxter's preference would be defence first so the first graphic shows the number of tackles made in the Premiership so far by each Chiefs player who has featured (nb this excludes missed tackles). 
Unsurprisingly the largest areas are those forwards who play the most and its reflective of how little the likes of Henry Slade and Jack Nowell have featured this season. 
Sam Simmonds has made the most tackles with 163 (with just 8 missed - he also has the highest tackle success rate of any player who has played for more than 30 mins), with Jonny Hill (125), Jacques Vermeulen (123), Jannes Kirsten (120) and Dave Ewers (119) also having made over 100 tackles. 
Notably both the fly halves (Gareth Steenson and Joe Simmonds) feature quite strongly for the backs, while the departed trio of Sam Hill, Nic White and Matt Kvesic have made significant contributions.
Putting the boot on the other statistical foot let's look at some attacking measures firstly carries made by each player. 
The incredible Sam Simmonds is once again leading the way and having carried 135 times, he's some way ahead of the others with Dave Ewers (104) and Tom O'Flaherty (102) the only other Chiefs playes to have carried 100 times so far in the Gallagher Premiership. Once again the departed trio of Sam Hill, Nic White and Matt Kvesic contributions to the first half of the season should not be downplayed. 
And finally this chart shows the metres gained in those carries. Suddenly the wingers & full backs start to feature with Tom O'Flaherty's 589 metres leading the way. Amazingly for a number 8 that man Sam Simmonds is in third place for metres gained.  
Technical bit:
This was compiled in R and the graphics are produced using Treemapify. In terms of the how to replicate this Treemapify documentation is excellent and really useful and possibly clear than my own code. However I've produced an extract of the code used for the tackles below

#aes for area, the fill colour (in this case based on the players most common position played in) and what I'm using as the labels
tacks_treemap <- ggplot(chiefs, aes(area=tacklesmade,fill=mode_pos,label=PLAYER))+
  #treemap object
  geom_treemap()+
  #add and format the label text (player names)
  geom_treemap_text(fontface = "italic", colour = "white", place = "centre",
                    grow = TRUE)+
  #nb this is my own theme object that I've created
  bs_tree_theme+
  #labels for the chart
  labs(title="Exeter Chiefs tackles made by player",subtitle='Gallagher Premiership 2019/20',
       fill = "Position")
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Please let me know what you think and leave a comment below

Popular posts from this blog

How many points = automatic promotion in the football league?

Its very much that time of year, where for those of us with a vested interest any Saturday afternoon glance at some football scores leads onto some hurried mental arithmetic as we try and work out whether the season in which we've already invested emotionally and financially will end in glory or not. As a Luton Town fan I have some 'skin in the game' again this year, and therefore for the past few weeks I've been trying to work out whether or not the Hatters are on track for a second successive year.... what follows is some of my workings. How many points do you need to get promoted in the English Football League?  We'll start by comparing the points needed for the title and promotion in each of the EFL's three divisions and see whether any division is 'easier' to win (in terms of points scored, obviously the championship is the hardest to win from a purely footballing point of view). For the sake of simplicity throughout this blog I'll refer
Post a Comment
Read more

European Champions Cup Player Charts - Backs

Following yesterday's post showing the charts for forwards in this years European Champions Cup here are some similar graphs for the Backs. Player Work Rate I've tried to simplify this as much as possible (and make it comparable across the piece) so these charts are simply looking at tackles per 80 minutes and carries per 80 minutes. I know this is a massive over simplification but it should act as a bit of a measure for the number of collisions sustained by a player. Things like interactions at the breakdown aren't counted (because I don't have access to those stats) which is a limitation but still there is some value in these graphics: Back 3 Its not much of a surprise that the wingers and fullbacks dont get their hands on the ball that often. Will Addison is a notable exception to this averaging almost 18 carries per game;  Taqele Naiyaravoro, Simon Zebo and Nick Abendanon are the other busy carriers. Elsewhere the prodigious Louis Rees-Zammit is makin
Post a Comment
Read more

Do Exeter Chiefs suffer from rustiness after a break?

This is something that has become something approaching accepted wisdom, that Exeter Chiefs struggle in their first game back in the Gallagher Premiership after a break. But is it true do they falter in the first week after a break? Do Exeter Chiefs struggle after a break from Premiership action? So the first thing to do is dust off the records and have a look Now I'm not concerned about the number of days (that's for another blog another day), just the number of weeks between games, equally I've excluded cup games from the equation as it does seem to be a peculiarly Premiership issue (the European games always follow a Premiership block). So looking at the whole of Exeter's premiership history what difference does the time between Premiership Games make? Number of Weeks Games Win % 1 week 130 60.77% 2 weeks 19 78.95% 3 weeks 29 58.62% 4 weeks 1 0.00% 5 weeks 8 50.00% >5 weeks 10 50.00% So actually Chiefs have a better record when they've had
Post a Comment
Read more