The Rugby League Eye Test

Another NRL round has concluded, and yet again the Gold Coast Titans have surrendered a lead that they should have held on to. After leading 14-0 at the major break, they capitulated and threw away a lead that was defend-able, succumbing to Canterbury 20-18. The last 12 minutes of this game were particularly diabolical for them, with the following string of penalties occurring whilst holding on to an 18-14 lead (that they would eventually surrender): 76th minute – dangerous tackle (Aaron Schoupp) 73rd minute – ball strip (David Fifita) 69th minute – dangerous tackle (Tino Fa’asuamaleaui) 68th minute – dangerous...

Since I couldn’t be joining the swathes of NRL fans on Caxton street this season, I decided to spend my valuable weekend time cataloguing which colour and brand of boots every NRL player wore at Magic Round. If there’s useless information I can track and create content out of, you can bet I’m going to do so. Whilst that sounds like a significant time investment, it’s not the first time I’ve done it so I’ve managed to build some economies of scale into the process. After a while you start to recognise the design language each brand uses, as well...

The month of April has closed and after nine rounds of the 2023 NRL season every team is at least one third of the way through their campaign. That makes it a good time to update every team’s progress by expected points to see which of them are over or under performing. We did this a month ago, but with only 4-5 games played the sample size was small enough that a lucky win or loss had too much influence. As we did last time, we’re going to compare each team’s on field performance with what they would have been...

Friday night’s game against Brisbane was always going to be a test for the Parramatta Eels. Facing the competition leaders in Darwin on a short turnaround was always going to be tough, but the Eels made it tougher on themselves with simple errors and were obviously exhausted early. If you want to read a full recap of the game, friend of the site Liam of The Maroon Observer has a tremendous write up that I’d suggest reading. I’d also highly suggest subscribing to his substack as he’s putting out at least 4 pieces of content per week, and if you...

As passionate as the Warriors faithful are, I don’t think many of them in their wildest dreams could have envisioned a start to the season like this. With all due respect to THE Dolphins (and somewhat the Raiders), the Warriors have always been the people’s team. If you don’t enjoy watching Shaun Johnson play, then I wonder if you have the ability to feel anything at all. Up the Wahs. The media weren’t particularly high on them either in the pre-season, with quite a number of outlets picking them to finish up either 16th or with the wooden spoon. Even...

When I launched the Eye Test’s expected points model (ETxP) for the National Rugby League over a year ago I had some new types of analysis planned for the season. Sadly after losing access to some of the data I had to shelve most of those plans.  However they were only shelved temporarily and not binned completely. Thankfully with the return of data needed to calculate ETxP I can start these up again. With Round 6 of the 2023 season now complete, it’s time to start using them for more than just expected points. Thank you for reading The Rugby...