The quarter finals stage of the Rugby World Cup was concluded with South Africa’s victory over Japan (link). Forty-four games have been played. The official website for the tournament provides a Stats page for each game (link).
Data are provided for:
- Territory
- Possession
- Attack
- Kicking
- Set pieces
- Discipline
- Defence
Of these, I have chosen to look closely at discipline (referee, referee’s country of origin, penalties and free kicks conceded and cards), passes (attack), kicks, lineouts and scrums (set pieces). I am particularly interested in how mobile a game is so I have monitored two ratios (lineouts:scrums and passes:kicks). I have curated these data as a Google Sheet (link).
I have separate tabs within the Google Sheet to provide granular data including cards given by referees.
I have a particular interest in whether my two ratios can become a single figure to describe a game (link). The numbers I have calculated range from 0.52 (New Zealand v Namibia) to 6.31 (Wales v Uruguay). The median game ratio is 2.55. I have explored these data with R. My visualisations using size (with a geom_hline as a median), colour and annotate (for outliers) are:
After forty-four games, the median game content I have is:
- 16 penalties and free kicks conceded
- 58 kicks
- 264 passes
- 14 scrums
- 25 lineouts
These medians become probability priors for subsequent games. It will be interesting to see what kind of games the semi-finals are.
Photo Credit
On attack (RWC2019)
