Blindsided Sports Stats

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...

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...