I hope Hugonaut doesn't mind me linking this on his behalf but I really felt that it deserved its own thread. I was just going to PM him to commend him on the work he put into this article but really that work needs/deserves to be seen by as many people as possible.
One of my biggest frustrations in rugby is when fans don't appreciate how hard certain players are working and this article has somehow managed to capture the impact that players really had during the Lions series. Conversely, there are guys that you tend to think are hard working because they don't come up with the big plays and assume they're plugging away but they may not have done as much as you thought. I've used this example a few times on here but a few years ago people on here wanted New Leo to get more games and then wondered why we'd get slow ball or lose turnovers when he did play, a system such as this would have highlighted that brilliantly and is essentially at the heart of how rugby works.
As some of the comments underneath say, it's a brilliant rating system that could have uses beyond that article.
So at this risk of repeating myself, bravo Hugonaut!
P.s. I partly wanted to highlight this for a selfish reason...told you all Tom Croft wasn't just a show pony!
I'm a disciple of the "win the rucks to win the game" school, so this stuff is music to my ears, manna to my gob and art to my eyes.
There are 3 aspects to the ruck I'm curious to know how they are catered for with your grading system. One is getting over the ball, that - in a nutshell is what the ruck is all about. From the second the ruck is called, all you're really trying to do is get over the ball and get it away. Is a player who gets past the ball graded a "decisive" or does it depend on where the ball was when he hit the ruck? Not sure if I'm wording the question well, but I gues you get my drift.
The second is ruck penalties. There's a subjectivity to this, because players can commit ruck offenses and not be penalised, players can commit no penalty and be penalised and players can fall foul of the ref's "offence du jour". There definitely should be a negative mark for ruck offences, I think. It's tough to set a common rule for them, but - as we know only too well recently for Ireland and Leinster - coming in the side or going off the feet in your own 22 can be the losing of a game.
The last one is the difficulty of the "present" grade. A guy in a ruck doing nothing is a guy who is out of the game for the next phase and maybe the one after that (wonder what the stat is for that!!). I'd nearly be going the other direction and awarding a bonus point to each player in a successful attacking ruck (ball delivered under x secs for example) and a successful defensive ruck (no fringe attack off the following phase?) if there were fewer than 4 players in it. I wouldn't place a very high value on "present" players if they're not performing a function other than MAYBE discouraging a counter-ruck.
Great stuff. It doesn't look like the body of work you can do very often, so very appreciative of the time you put into it.
Xanthippe wrote:When people praise me for my stats I'm always embarrassed because I'm not in the ha'penny place in comparison to 'The Mole' - he's my God of Stats!!
Well done Hugo - what an amazing piece of work.
You still do great work. A credit to Leinster fans
Ruddock's tackle stats consistently too low for me to be taken seriously as a Six Nations blindside..... Ruddock's defensive stats don't stack up. - All Blacks Nil, Jan 15th, 2014
England A 8 - 14 Ireland A, 25th Jan 2014 Ruddock(c) 19/2 Tackles
The last one is the difficulty of the "present" grade. A guy in a ruck doing nothing is a guy who is out of the game for the next phase and maybe the one after that (wonder what the stat is for that!!). I'd nearly be going the other direction and awarding a bonus point to each player in a successful attacking ruck (ball delivered under x secs for example) and a successful defensive ruck (no fringe attack off the following phase?) if there were fewer than 4 players in it. I wouldn't place a very high value on "present" players if they're not performing a function other than MAYBE discouraging a counter-ruck.
Good point well illustrated in the article by the ruck full of Irish players and one New Zealander. One of the more irritating tropes in commentary is "x are not putting enough bodies into the breakdown" when in fact they are repeatedly doing the opposite while their opponents are not. X then gets caught short on numbers when pushed across the field and Y spots the opportunity and counter rucks them. Only problem is introducing a penalty point for "hanging around in a ruck they should not be at" would most likely make the system too subjective.
I have two slightly negative, but hopefully constructively so, comments to make...
Firstly, the ruck is regarded as an entity in itself. Often its not, its part of a three or four phase predetermined set of plays and they might have no other purpose in being at a breakdown other than it being part of set in which they are planned to be involved a phase or two down the line - or to play a slightly nefarious role, like Heaslips role in Madigans try in the Amlin final. To take your example about the New Zealand game, what if the next play was a pick and go, those guys go from just standing there to actively preparing for the next phase of play.
Secondly, there are no negative marks for being penalised at the ruck. The ruck is a simple thing in the laws, you even have the ref giving instruction on it during the game, so being penalised at the ruck is a soft penalty to concede not to mention that its a turnover - there should be a negative mark for doing so, perhaps subtracting the 'original' value of their ruck points plus an additional point - so to again take the NZ example given, if BOD had been penalised he would have had 5 points subtracted from his total
As the Avatar suggests, this is the sort of stuff that I wish that every selector of the old days, and every coach of the modern era, had available when he sat down the following week at selection meetings.
In the classic sense, this is a seminal piece of work and whilst some of the comments offered on the site, by those who have praised the content and intent, suggest good possible developments of the theorem, there is no doubt that Demented Mole has proposed a evaluation process which could actually influence the value of players in the transfer market.
Conceptually, the Mole recognises that the effective rucker is an invaluable player (particularly in NH rugby). To then propose a clear - albeit arduous - process of analysis to quantify how you can identify a good rucker, as distinct from a poor rucker, or a ruck spoofer, is ground-breaking.
If you love the game, and particularly if all they ever gave you was a jersey numbered from 1 to 8 or 16 to 20, read this article carefully and feel validated for ever!
Dave Cahill wrote:I have two slightly negative, but hopefully constructively so, comments to make...
Firstly, the ruck is regarded as an entity in itself. Often its not, its part of a three or four phase predetermined set of plays and they might have no other purpose in being at a breakdown other than it being part of set in which they are planned to be involved a phase or two down the line - or to play a slightly nefarious role, like Heaslips role in Madigans try in the Amlin final. To take your example about the New Zealand game, what if the next play was a pick and go, those guys go from just standing there to actively preparing for the next phase of play.
Secondly, there are no negative marks for being penalised at the ruck. The ruck is a simple thing in the laws, you even have the ref giving instruction on it during the game, so being penalised at the ruck is a soft penalty to concede not to mention that its a turnover - there should be a negative mark for doing so, perhaps subtracting the 'original' value of their ruck points plus an additional point - so to again take the NZ example given, if BOD had been penalised he would have had 5 points subtracted from his total
It's far too much for my lickle mind to contribute much to, but Hugo has done huge and astounding work to start building a system, but there's probably an 'open-source' project a la Linux or Wikipedia to hone his work to a more perfect state. There's also a need for someone to develop a recording mechanism (IT programme?) to speed up the analysis. That would make it really useful- but also eliminate some of those pointless but hugely enjoyable wrangles where us lazy feckers get to have there opinions taken- at least partly seriously!
"Oh, I used to be disgusted, and now I try to be amused!"
Dave Cahill wrote:I have two slightly negative, but hopefully constructively so, comments to make...
Firstly, the ruck is regarded as an entity in itself. Often its not, its part of a three or four phase predetermined set of plays and they might have no other purpose in being at a breakdown other than it being part of set in which they are planned to be involved a phase or two down the line - or to play a slightly nefarious role, like Heaslips role in Madigans try in the Amlin final. To take your example about the New Zealand game, what if the next play was a pick and go, those guys go from just standing there to actively preparing for the next phase of play.
Secondly, there are no negative marks for being penalised at the ruck. The ruck is a simple thing in the laws, you even have the ref giving instruction on it during the game, so being penalised at the ruck is a soft penalty to concede not to mention that its a turnover - there should be a negative mark for doing so, perhaps subtracting the 'original' value of their ruck points plus an additional point - so to again take the NZ example given, if BOD had been penalised he would have had 5 points subtracted from his total
It's far too much for my lickle mind to contribute much to, but Hugo has done huge and astounding work to start building a system, but there's probably an 'open-source' project a la Linux or Wikipedia to hone his work to a more perfect state. There's also a need for someone to develop a recording mechanism (IT programme?) to speed up the analysis. That would make it really useful- but also eliminate some of those pointless but hugely enjoyable wrangles where us lazy feckers get to have there opinions taken- at least partly seriously!
However I don't know how crucial the software is as you could probably do a hell of a lot on a spreadsheet. The tough thing is getting the data to analyse as for rugby, there doesn't seem to be any option other than sitting in front of a TV and coding it for yourself.
IIRC some US sports have open sourced performance data and Man City also announced they were doing this with their data. They are hoping that fans will be able to produce useful stuff with this data rather than just relying on their in-house analysts.
A masterpiece.
