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...

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...