Blindsided Sports Stats

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...