LONG READ Who will win the Champions Cup quarter-finals? What the stats say

It is the great Moneyball debate. Are stats more trustworthy than impressions? As a baseball player coming fresh out of college, Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane was a ‘five-tool guy’, the king of scouting impressions. He had all of the five essential characteristics the scouts looked for in a future superstar: he could get bat on ball consistently, he could hit with power for home runs, he had great running speed and endurance, he could field and he could throw the ball. Billy Beane was the prototypical ‘five-tool guy’.

But as a player Beane failed in the major leagues, and the subjective hunches of the scouts – all the ‘good body nonsense’ – were proved wrong. As a manager, Beane flipped the game on its head by turned to data-driven analytics to replace scouting intuition, and for the most part he was proven right.

Beane preferred scruffy, hard-nosed ’on-base percentage’ facts to the beauty of a pure swing. As baseball stats evolved, OBP replaced BA [hits per bat]. The point of batting was not to get out and force errors out of the pitcher, rather than to go down swinging, and missing in a blaze of glory. ‘Walks’ [when the batter advances to first base by leaving pitches outside the strike zone] were as valuable as direct hits. As the Billy Beane character, played by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt, in the eponymous movie declares: ‘He gets on base a lot. Do I care whether it’s a walk or a hit? No, I do not’.

The Moneyball movie, produced back in 2011, was the start rather than the finish of the discussion, and it sparked an escalating debate about the value of sporting stats. The distrust of statistics has grown in proportion to its an ever-increasing dependence on raw data to dig out the truth behind appearances. Every major political organisation and pharmaceutical company now employs their own ‘think tank’ to cherry-pick data which will justify the outcomes they want to see out in the real world.

In truth, the balance between British 19^th Century prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s famous assertion that ‘there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics’, and the American statistician and ‘father of the quality movement’ W. Edwards Deming’s statement that ‘without data, you’re just another person with an opinion’ is still being sought.

Rugby remains a very young professional sport, and the value of different data-sets is being constantly re-assessed. For example, one of the most stable metrics for measuring the physical speed and intensity of games has been ‘ball-in-play time’ [BIP] but more recently, it has been challenged by the ‘ball out-of-play’ metric, measuring the amount of time lost to stoppages and breaks in play. The truth is somewhere in that elusive space in between.

The match between Glasgow and Toulon will be a relentlessly hard-hitting affair, with both sides having the highest ratio of post-contact metres at the gain-line in the competition.

I have used some of the more relevant categories from recent praxis as tools to evaluate the upcoming quarter-finals in the European Champions Cup.

The two easiest games to forecast are the quarter-finals between URC league leaders Glasgow Warriors and the Top 14’s RC Toulon, and perennial Irish contenders Leinster and Sale Sharks from the Prem in England.

The match between Glasgow and Toulon will be a relentlessly hard-hitting affair, with both sides having the highest ratio of post-contact metres at the gain-line in the competition. The two teams lie first and second in the ruck retention stakes among the last eight clubs, with Glasgow setting 120 rucks per game to Toulon’s 98.

As things stand, the Warriors are slightly better on all statistical counts and their cohesion and home advantage [the invisible and unquantifiable factor] should see them through to the semi-finals.

Leinster struggled to put away Edinburgh until the final quarter in the round-of-16, winning the last 25 minutes by 21 points to nil. That is the category which stands out in the upcoming encounter with Alex Sanderson’s Sale Sharks.

The Sharks have power in the collision on both attack and defence, enough power to trouble the Dublin province in the meat of the match, but the strength of the Leinster bench is just too obvious to ignore, even without towering Springbok giant RG Snyman.

The two most difficult games to evaluate by far, are those between the twin giants of Top 14 rugby, Union Bordeaux-Bègles and Stade Toulousain, and the two clubs who currently stand head and shoulders above all others in the English Prem, Northampton Saints and Bath Rugby.

Although UBB edge most of the categories based on Champions Cup form in the current season, there are a number of them which are sufficiently close that they could turn around on the day.

If les rouges-et-noirs prove that they can defend well; if the scrum balance turns against the home side and if Toulouse can establish their big carrying forwards on the gain-line off Antoine Dupont, they could turn the tables on their great rivals. These are the spaces where the data stands back and the hunches take centre-stage.

Last season, UBB claimed the Champions Cup, overcoming Toulouse 35-18 in the semi-finals but Toulousain got its own back over Girondin in the Top 14 final eight weeks later. This season it is one game apiece in the league fixtures, with both clubs rotating their squads heavily for the two away games.

If UBB establish an early lead, their counter-attack will go from strength to strength and they will be too good to reel back in. But if the match is still close towards the end, the joker in the pack could be the goal-kicking accuracy of ‘deadeye dick’ Thomas Ramos [94%] over Bordeaux’s Maxime Lucu [80%].

Bordeaux v Toulouse stats” width=”6667″ height=”2683″ />

The real nailbiter of the round, at least according to the stats, could well prove to be the encounter at The Rec between Bath and Northampton.

Impressions are nowhere more important than here. Northampton hold a statistical edge in the scrum penalty-winning stats, but the impact of Thomas Du Toit off the bench was decisive in the last round against Saracens. That fact, coupled with the West Countrymen’s usual fourth-quarter dominance could outweigh the Saints’ greater attacking cohesion earlier in the game.

As with UBB versus Toulouse, if it comes down to the last kick of the game you would probably prefer to be in the boots of Finn Russell [87%] rather than Fin Smith [60%].

It was John Henry, the owner of the long-suffering Boston Red Sox, and now principal owner of Liverpool Football Club in the Premier League, who offered to give Billy Beane a crack at the big time. It didn’t work out with the Oakland A’s manager, but it did with Beane’s spiritual mentor, ‘sabermetrician’ Bill James. Only one year after the publication of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, and two short seasons after Henry hired James, the Red Sox broke the 86 year-old ‘curse of the Bambino’ and won the 2004 MLB World Series.

As a young sport of only 30 years standing, professional rugby is in its infancy and the world of analysis within it is still evolving. Metrics are adopted and discarded with alarming frequency, but the data itself is already far more refined and detailed than it was even 10 years ago. Impressions and intuitions still have their place, but they have become primarily important as they are applied to a pre-existing world of data, and we are entering the remorseless, unflinching age of facts John Henry described:

“To the extent you can eliminate both [beliefs and biases] and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage. Many people think they are smarter than others in the stock market and that the market itself has no intrinsic intelligence – as if it’s inert. Many people think they are smarter than others in baseball and that the game on the field is simply what they think it is through their set of images/beliefs. Actual data from the market means more than individual’s perception/belief. The same is true in baseball.”

As Billy Beane adds in Michael Lewis’ book, “Know exactly what every player in baseball is worth to you. You can put a dollar figure on it.” Substitute ‘metric’ for ‘player’ and you have the new golden age of rugby analysis, right there before your very eyes.