Since my last post was a hit and as I have a bit of time on my hands today, I did a bit of a deeper dive on Ash as he cops a lot of criticism, some of which I think is unfair. I've noticed that rugbah leeg fans tend to skew towards pessimism and hone in on the negatives, so hopefully these stats help to make the bigger picture a bit clearer. Namely that Ash is one of the best attacking performers and is far from the worst half overall. Criticism of my scoring methods/analysis is welcome. If mods think this belongs in its own thread, I'm happy to split it out of this match thread.
Method
I looked at 3 key areas: 1) Attack, 2) Defence, 3) Discipline. I didn’t have time to compile stats for all halves currently in the league, so I picked out some of the more prominent halves like Pearce, DCE and Keary as well as some of the younger guys like Flanagan, Clifford and Croft. I also included some players such as Cleary, Walker, Milford and Brooks who should be roughly equivalent to Ash in terms of experience / role in the team.
For Attack, the key stats I looked at were: Try Assists (TA), Try Contributions (TC), Total Try Involvements (TTI), Linebreak Assists (LBA), Forced Dropouts (FDO) and 40/20. An overall Attack Score (AS) was then taken as the sum of each of these key stats. Attack rankings are in order of highest Attack Score to lowest.
For Defence, the key stats I looked at were: Tackles (TK), Missed Tackles (MT), Ineffective Tackles (IT), Tackle Efficiency (TE, %), Try Causes (TC), and Linebreak Causes (LBC). The overall Defence Score (DS) was taken as the negative sum of Try Causes and Linebreak Causes, then adjusted by dividing by the Tackle Efficiency, i.e. a lower Tackle Efficiency results in a more negative Defense Score. For example, a total of 10 Try Causes and Linebreak Causes with a tackle efficiency of 100% results in a Defense Score of -10, whereas the same number of Causes with a tackle efficiency of 75% results in a Defense Score of -13.33 (-10/0.75 = -13.33). Note that the Tackle Efficiency was taken as the proportion of Tackles to all tackle attempts, i.e. TE = TK / (TK + MT + IT). For this purpose, Missed Tackles and Ineffective Tackles were treated as equivalent. Note that defence rankings are in order of highest Defence Score to lowest.
The Overall Score (OS) was then taken as the sum of the Attack and Defence Scores.
For Discipline, I looked at: Minutes Played (MP), Possessions (PO), Handling & Defensive Errors (HDE), Kick Errors (KE), and Penalties (PE). I then took Total Infringements (TI) as the sum of all errors and penalties and the Infringement Rate was calculated as the Total Infringements per 80 minutes, i.e. infringements per equivalent full match. The Error Rate was then calculated as the number of Possessions per Error (P/E) and the involvement rate was calculated as the Possessions per 80 Min (P/80). No overall score was calculated for Discipline but instead these stats were used as general indicators to supplement the Attack/Defence scores. Discipline rankings are in order of most Possessions per Error to least.
All stats were sourced from the Fox Sports Lab.
Results
Apologies for the formatting of the stats. I couldn't figure out how to embed a table. If anyone is interested, you should be able to copy and delimit by space in Excel. If anyone knows how to fix the formatting, let me know and I'll edit the post. The key stats that I ranked the players by in each category are highlighted in bold.
Discipline
MP PO HDE KE PE TI P/80 I/80 P/E
K. Flanagan 725 335 3 0 7 10 36.97 1.10 111.67
N. Cleary 559 473 6 5 1 12 67.69 1.72 43.00
D. Cherry-Evans 710 577 10 4 3 17 65.01 1.92 41.21
M. Pearce 645 558 13 5 3 21 69.21 2.60 31.00
C. Walker 550 293 8 3 7 18 42.62 2.62 26.64
B. Croft 654 387 10 5 2 17 47.34 2.08 25.80
A. Milford 720 278 9 2 5 16 30.89 1.78 25.27
L. Brooks 560 331 10 4 1 15 47.29 2.14 23.64
L. Keary 725 435 15 4 1 20 48.00 2.21 22.89
J. Clifford 560 274 8 5 4 17 39.14 2.43 21.08
A. Taylor 702 401 14 6 4 24 45.70 2.74 20.05
Attack
TA TC TTI LBA FDO 40/20 AS Errors per Attack Score
L. Keary 11 8 23 7 5 0 54 0.35
N. Cleary 5 10 17 4 7 2 45 0.24
M. Pearce 7 4 13 8 4 0 36 0.50
A. Taylor 8 2 11 6 7 1 35 0.57
K. Flanagan 4 5 13 5 4 0 31 0.10
D. Cherry-Evans 4 4 10 8 5 0 31 0.45
C. Walker 7 2 12 5 2 0 28 0.39
J. Clifford 4 1 6 1 8 0 20 0.65
B. Croft 4 4 9 0 2 0 19 0.79
L. Brooks 3 2 7 3 3 0 18 0.78
A. Milford 5 0 6 1 3 0 15 0.73
Defence
TK MT IT TE (%) TC LBC DS
N. Cleary 109 18 12 78 0 0 0
M. Pearce 187 32 8 82 1 2 -4
L. Brooks 148 17 4 88 1 4 -6
L. Keary 130 16 10 83 2 3 -6
J. Clifford 135 20 15 79 3 2 -6
C. Walker 118 12 8 86 3 3 -7
D. Cherry-Evans 137 11 6 89 4 3 -8
A. Taylor 133 26 17 76 5 5 -13
B. Croft 169 15 13 86 6 6 -14
K. Flanagan 219 19 18 86 7 6 -15
A. Milford 81 24 5 74 8 8 -22
Overall
OS
L. Keary 48
N. Cleary 45
M. Pearce 32
D. Cherry-Evans 23
A. Taylor 22
C. Walker 21
K. Flanagan 16
J. Clifford 14
L. Brooks 12
B. Croft 5
A. Milford -7
Discussion
• At first glance, Ash appears to be very poorly disciplined as he scored the lowest Possessions per Error with 20.05. Kyle Flanagan was far and away the best in this category, with a whopping 111.67. The benchmark halves (Cleary, DCE, Pearce, Keary) were generally around 30-45 Possessions per Error, except for Keary who was 22.89.
• In attack, Ash scored very well with an Attack Score of 35, placing him fourth behind Keary (54), Cleary (45), and Pearce (36). Apart from Cleary, Ash was well ahead of his counterparts: Walker (28), Brooks (18), and Milford (15).
• Normalising the Error Rate to the Attack Score better reflects the risk vs. reward of making errors in high risk attacking plays. Ash’s normalised Errors per Attack Score of 0.57 is around the middle of the pack and likely reflects that, while he makes more errors than other halves, his creativity also pays off more frequently. For reference, the most disciplined player, Flanagan, has a normalised Errors per Attack Score of 0.1, demonstrating that his attacking successes come at little discipline cost. The worst offenders in this statistic are Croft (0.79), Brooks (0.78) and Milford (0.73). These high scores demonstrate poor payoff for their attacking risktaking.
• In defence, Ash was towards the bottom of the pack with a Defence Score of -13. The best performer in this category was Cleary with a perfect Defence Score of 0 thanks to his 0 Tries Conceded and Linebreaks Condeded. The other benchmark halves of Pearce, Keary and DCE scored between -4 and -8, so Ash was a fair way off in terms of Defence, but it’s also important to note that he was ahead of Croft (-14), Flanagan (-15) and well ahead of Milford (-22).
• For Overall Score, Luke Keary was the best performer thanks largely to his immense Attack Score. His Defense Score of -6 let him down somewhat compared to Cleary, but he made up for it with his potent attack. Surprisingly, DCE scored quite poorly (23) compared to the other benchmark halves of Keary (48), Cleary (45), and Pearce (32). Ash was only 1 point behind DCE with an Overall Score of 22, ahead of Walker (21) and well ahead of the remaining halves of which none scored higher than 16. Notably poor performers were both Broncos halves with Croft only scoring 5 and Milford scoring a dismal -7.
• The scoring system described above does not account for the intangibles like leadership/organising qualities or effect of the players around the player in question.
Conclusions
Ash’s score of 22 is remarkably good when one considers that his Defence Score is likely significantly affected by the overall team performance. The Titans currently sit second last with 245 points conceded. Only the Cowboys have conceded more points with 253. With upcoming matches against the Storm, Panthers and Roosters, this is unlikely to improve in the short term. Compared to players of equivalent experience / team role (Cleary, Walker, Milford, Brooks), Taylor is second only to Cleary. Milford and Brooks are particularly poor performers, especially given the quality of players around him in Milford’s case. Taylor cops a lot of criticism in the press and from our own fans, but these statistics show that he is actually performing relatively well compared to other halves. If our overall team defence can improve, I expect his Defence and Overall Scores to also improve. I speculate that if Taylor were surrounded by the quality that Cleary is, he would not be far behind.
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