Some of the delegates from the 14th Australasian Conference on Mathematics and Computers in Sport attended the Sunshine Coast Lightning v NSW Swifts netball game on 28 July 2018.
I wrote about their visit in a previous post. I shared some netball data relevant to the game in a GitHub repository. I have written a postscript about the data in the READ.ME file for the repository.
My summary chart is:
As the game progressed, the probability of the Lightning winning moved from 0.63 after leading at the end of the first quarter of the game to 0.76 after leading at half time to 0.87 with their lead at the end of the third quarter.
The two teams met in Round 7 this season’s competition. I thought the Lightning’s first quarter performance reflected their determination after losing the first quarter of that game by 10 goals. Their final quarter performance was also better than their median performance for that quarter this season.
The Swifts underperformed in the game compared to their median scoring profile this season. It would have been interesting to have attended the game to observe the pressure the Lightning placed on the Swifts.
A report of the game included these observations:
The defence of the Lightning did the job at USC Stadium. Karla Pretorius finished with six intercepts, Madeline McAuliffe was a brick wall in the second half and centre Laura Scherian was the Nissan MVP to complete the defensive triumvirate.
The Swifts were competitive and fought to the final whistle, but they were left to rue a number of missed opportunities to score off turnovers.
Post-game I looked for some temporal patterns (T-patterns) to support evidence of strong Lightning performances in quarters 1 and 4. The Champion Data scoring flow for the game had these sequences of scoring within the overall alternating of possession:
Quarter 1
Quarter 4
Photo Credit
Courtside (Andrew Simmons, Twitter)
