Blindsided Sports Stats

The rarest scores in premiership rugby A few weeks ago I looked at some of the most common scores in premiership rugby, this time I'm looking at some of the rarest. The first place to start is by defining rarity so we'll look at those scores with the lowest frequencies. We'll also look at relative rarity. Rugby's rather peculiar scoring system means that some adjacent scores are much more likely than others. For example in 25 seasons premiership rugby teams scored 9 points 100 times but 8 points 194 times and 10 points 218 times. The rules At this point I should say that I've excluded those impossible scores 1, 2 and 4. I suppose those scores are rare, in the sense that you are unlikely to see them.  But the comparison I'd use is that you wouldn't describe a Dodo as rare and like a Dodo these scores are extinct for now.  I also excluded the Covid walkovers. Whilst there were scorelines given they didn't happen.  I've used scorelines from the 25 seaso...

I am well aware that the most common score in premiership rugby is a bit of a pointless metric. Yet it is interesting, to me at least and hopefully to you as well to take a brief look: As we saw previously the most common or mode score for all games is 20. This has happened 319 times in premiership rugby up to the end of the 2021/22 season.  Overall 4.67% of all premiership scores finished as 20, ironically almost 1 in 20. Of those 319 scorelines 20 has been scored 176 times by away teams (it is the most common away score) and by 143 at home teams. It is the second most popular home score, as 24 has been recorded by 147 home teams. 20 has been scored 191 times by a losing team and 128 times as a winning team. Though 20 is the most common score it is neither the most common winning or losing score (24 and 13 respectively). Nor is 20-20 the most common scoreline in drawn games either. 27-27 is the most common draw in premiership history (11 times or 22 scores). Looking at the da...

Average scores in premiership rugby What is the average score? I've been exploring what the average score is in a premiership rugby game.  The first question might even be which average? You can make a fair case for using the mean or median average score. Even the often overlooked the mode could be a useful measure in this context.  The first chart below is simple, and shows scores in premiership games since 1997. The shape of the curve is as we would expect g iven a negative score is (so far) impossible in rugby  is positively skewed with a long tail to the left.  The most common score in premiership rugby over the past 25 seasons is 20 points,  with 319 occurrences, ahead of 16 (294) and 19 (287). What I like most about the graph above though is those odd little patterns. With hard (or unlikely) to score totals such as 18 which has happened 200 times, nestled between 17 (252) and 19 (287)   The median (middle) premiership score is 21 meaning 50% of s...

You might well say that I'm a bit late to write about last season and given it finished 8 months ago and that this season is close to drawing to a close and you'd be right. However given how significant it was for those of us in the Westcountry I thought it was worth dwelling on one more time.  Whichever way you describe the 2020/21 season (all 13 months of it) it was pretty remarkable for Exeter Chiefs, with the Devon side winning both the English Premiership and the European Champions Cup. Many words have already been written about this by better (and more timely) writers than me. But nevertheless here are some combined stats from European and Premiership games for Chiefs last season. However below are five charts to refresh the memory or maybe even show it in a new angle.  Amazingly given his struggles in the past with serious injury, (Big) Dave Ewers spent more time on the field that any other player a total of 1845 minutes (over 60 hrs). Sam Simmonds (another who had miss...

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 feature...

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...

Following me spending a bit of time practising some R code looking at some of the Champions cup player data I thought I'd share some of the charts (or at least record them here for 'posterity').  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. I've split the charts by playing position so for no particular reason let's start with the back row Back Row First up the Back Row. The further up to the right the greater the amount of attrition faced by a player, and the size of the dot is their average metres per carry. As with a lot of charts the most interesting bits are found at the various extremes: Firstly CJ Stander's work rate is phenomenal with him making 96 carries...

Was England's epic win over Australia at Headingley the greatest of all time? Now the dust has settled a bit I thought I'd try and process how remarkable that test match was. First of all let me take you through how the match unfolded: Thursday : Joffra Archer takes six wickets as England bowl Australia out for 179. Morale in the Church household is sky high! Friday : England make 67 all out. I break the habit of a lifetime and stop following the Guardian's Over by Over coverage at work as its all too distressing. Morale in the Church household is rock bottom. Saturday : At my own game of cricket there is much discussion about how poor the England batting performance is, between us we recommend dropping all the batsmen. The game is still ongoing but no one is that bothered. The Ashes have gone Sunday : I pretend I'm not following the match but keep sneaking a glance at the score. Eventually with just under 30 to win I turn on TMS. Ben Stokes and Jack Leach perfor...

There's no place like home. Exeter Chiefs remarkable league home record This Sunday sees Exeter Chiefs play their 100th home premiership game (I'm including the playoff semi finals for sake of argument) at Sandy Park.  So lets have a look at how the "Fortress Sandy Park" stacks up. It all began back on September 4th 2010 as newly promoted Exeter beat Gloucester 22-10 in their first game in the Premiership (massive thanks to the previous sponsors of the league for letting me watch that for free), then a fortnight later Newcastle Falcons were seen off 22-17 and Chiefs were well on their way to establishing themselves in the top tier of English rugby. In all the first 99 games at Sandy Park have resulted in 72 home wins, 3 draws (bonus points for naming the opposition for each of them) and 24 away wins. Over Time In only one season have Chiefs finished with a losing record at home in the league with 7 defeats and just 4 wins in 2013/14, it should be noted that...