Reds 2014

[Tip]

people calling for Toua and Schatz to have a rest should read that page. The ones calling for Genius head sou;d read Scott Allen's column today.

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Not calling for Genia's head, just his right boot.
Toua is a fullback who can't kick, thus it's hardly surprising that he tops the running metres in the comp...

I'd start Harris at Fullback. Surely with Davies, Shippers and CFS we have enough speed. Harris has been so very impressive. I've got this horrible feeling that we're in for a winless tour of SA if we persist with a fullback who can't kick or hold the ball in contact.

 

[I like to watch]

I've been reading a lot about Reds defensive issues of late and the word diabolical was even used once. I know there's more to defence than tackling but I just read that the Reds have the highest 'Tackle Success' percentage of the competition at 90.7%. We're doing something right obviously. Tighten up the structures and we'll be hard to get through. Our opponent for this weekend sitting fair at the bottom looks good when you consider what our backs will be able to throw at them.

In case anyone was interested:

Reds 90.7
Stormers 90.4
Force 88.3
Blues 87.7
Chiefs 87.5
Cheetahs 87.2
Waratahs 87.1
Lions 87.0
Rebels 86.8
Crusaders 86.7
Bulls 86.6
Highlanders 86.6
Hurricanes 86.3
Sharks 83.3
Brumbies 80.0

That's a great demonstration on why you shouldn't rely too much on statistics.

Both the Force & the Reds are statistically better then the Tahs,yet they were both man shamed by the Tahs.

This has got to be a Michael Foley statistic.Someone scored a bonus point win against your doughnut,and you find a measure to demonstrate that you were superior to them.

How come despite the stats,both the Reds & For e are juicy odds this week,and the hapless Brumbies are favourites against the Unbeaten Tahs?

 

[Scoey]

That's a great demonstration on why you shouldn't rely too much on statistics.

Both the Force & the Reds are statistically better then the Tahs,yet they were both man shamed by the Tahs.

This has got to be a Michael Foley statistic.Someone scored a bonus point win against your doughnut,and you find a measure to demonstrate that you were superior to them.

How come despite the stats,both the Reds & For e are juicy odds this week,and the hapless Brumbies are favourites against the Unbeaten Tahs?

I'm not certain anyone is relying at all on the stats. They are simply, interesting snippets of information. Perhaps made more interesting by virtue of the points you raise.

 

[tranquility]

Not calling for Genia's head, just his right boot.
Toua is a fullback who can't kick, thus it's hardly surprising that he tops the running metres in the comp.

I'd start Harris at Fullback. Surely with Davies, Shippers and CFS we have enough speed. Harris has been so very impressive. I've got this horrible feeling that we're in for a winless tour of SA if we persist with a fullback who can't kick or hold the ball in contact.

Harris at fullback? Gee wizz, that has gone well in the past.

An interesting stat is that the Reds have the worst Ruck Success %, probably not a good stat to be at the bottom of.

 

[tranquility]

Serious question, with the emergence of Feauai-Sautia at 13, what does that mean in the long run for A Fainga'a and Tapuai? I know they've both been tried at 12 in the past, with mixed results, but with Harris also there will one have to move on or be prepared to ride the pine?

It's an issue that has been brewing for a while. Chris has been the future 13 of QLD since he debuted (maybe before), and we knew we were carrying an extra 12. Realistically one will have to move on, and it's why I get so angry about Taps not being played at 12. He is the best 12 we have, albeit out of form, but we have stuffed around so much that it would not surprise me in the slightest to seem him go to the Rebels at the end of the season with his Melbourne connection.

 

[USARugger]

I played pretty shit when I was getting played out of position for nearly a year too.

Meters run is a worthless stat unless you're looking at it in the context of the match. Running the ball back for 30m (ultimately losing 15-20m of territory), running from deep and getting 5m but getting hit 3m behind the gain line, etc.

The most interesting part of Schatz' line out catches stat is how many of them were steals

 

[Athilnaur]

All stats are useless unless you look at them in context though, USAR. I'd guess most coaches keep a weather eye on players involvements and metreage nevertheless, it is after all a fundamental of the game; 'go forward' as it were.

 

[Forcefield]

Did you know that the Department of Incomplete Statistics reported that 8 out of

 

[EatSleepDrinkRuck]

I prefer Harris to Finger and think that Taps has room to grow.

If one were to be flicked I think it has to be Finger.

This is just my opinion and I should admit I've never been that impressed with Index or Ring Fa'ainga.

 

[RedsHappy]

That's a great demonstration on why you shouldn't rely too much on statistics.

Both the Force & the Reds are statistically better then the Tahs,yet they were both man shamed by the Tahs.

This has got to be a Michael Foley statistic.Someone scored a bonus point win against your doughnut,and you find a measure to demonstrate that you were superior to them.

How come despite the stats,both the Reds & For e are juicy odds this week,and the hapless Brumbies are favourites against the Unbeaten Tahs?

You're right ILTW. These stats particularly: they derive from a tiny number of games, some teams have played a third less games than others so far, and the large cluster of team results around the high eighties as a % outcome highlights no real performance differentiation that's meaningful at this juncture of the comp.

Moreover, there is a massive problem with the widespread use of 'individual event or attribute' based rugby stats. Namely, and USARugger rightly notes this above, they are event isolates and the degree to which they actually correlate (or not at all) with the real performance outcomes that matter - points scored (or not) via a linked chain of performance events, potentially a very long chain - is totally unexamined and unrevealed by these types of isolated measures.

The only and right way to fix this would be invest in properly sophisticated rugby match databases, big deep-correlation-oriented stats models, and large computational resources of a type that could be used to reveal the far more powerful 'long chain correlations' whereby a huge range of team and player stats are combined over 80 mins or segments thereof in chain correlated form to yield what performance events in dynamic combination created the most points, or end up conceding the most points. To my knowledge, this has never been done for rugby at any level - and indeed it'd be a big task to get the foundation of these types of analytics in place.

I am not saying that the isolated event stats we have are totally useless, they can highlight over a season some useful observations. But, other than superficially, they by no means reliably explain a team's total rugby performance or even why teams win certain matches and not others, or win more matches than opponents over time.

 

[Scoey]

Geez. I said the stats were interesting. Not useful. No one has tried to argue any points using the stats as evidence.

I find lots of inane things interesting.

I get that you two have a beef with the over reliance on stats but what happened here wasn't that. There is actually a thread that discusses the merits of stats, so this type of convo is probably better suited to that location.


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[No4918]

RH, you seem to like some stats and not others. You use crowd results from one home game so early in the season as evidence that crowds are on the decline. Yet these tackle stats are meanlingless despite having many of the same characteristics as those you used to support your argument ie low sample size.

I have no problem with the argument that these stats should not be used in isolation to say the Reds defence is fine. In fact, the original poster of those stats said as much by saying that once the structures are in place or being better carried out by the players then individual tackle performance is at least as good or better than other sides, at least this is how I read it. Not sure that anyone has used them to say there are no problems. There have been many posts discussing stats in rugby over the few years I have been a member here, there limitations have been well discussed. That does not mean they are useless.

 

[EatSleepDrinkRuck]

Great points RedsHappy - that gives a great explanation to something I only vaguely understand.

The way I've explained it to people (despite my limited understanding) is comparing the usefulness of Rugby stats to NFL stats.

When you're looking at players in NFL you simply go: AP has X carries for Y yards with P fumbles. When you have a stoppage at the end of each phase these individual plays and stats take on a lot more meaning than say:

McCabe had X Carries for Y Meters with P handovers (Q % were slow ball) H tries, K assists, G offloads, D tackles from F attempts with J % dominant tackles and he was engaged in W rucks and M mauls and suffered Z broken necks.

 

[RedsHappy]

RH, you seem to like some stats and not others. You use crowd results from one home game so early in the season as evidence that crowds are on the decline. Yet these tackle stats are meanlingless despite having many of the same characteristics as those you used to support your argument ie low sample size.

I have no problem with the argument that these stats should not be used in isolation to say the Reds defence is fine. In fact, the original poster of those stats said as much by saying that once the structures are in place or being better carried out by the players then individual tackle performance is at least as good or better than other sides, at least this is how I read it. Not sure that anyone has used them to say there are no problems. There have been many posts discussing stats in rugby over the few years I have been a member here, there limitations have been well discussed. That does not mean they are useless.

1. I do indeed like some stats more than others, and I make no apologies for that. I like the ones where, for example, simple aggregated linear trends over time can reveal a genuine trend in behaviour or other factors.

So, if we take aggregate crowd attendances for a certain club, or sports code over time, we can reliably deduce a meaning from that as it's a final and complete measure so to speak (subject of course to elements like that whole city's population not shrinking in parallel, no economic collapses affecting incomes as a whole, and other teams or codes not all in parallel declining or increasing at the same rate, etc.).

2. I did not do as you say re 'trying to prove Reds' crowds in decline' - you are looking for negatives in other posts entirely so's to undermine my comments here, I have no idea why (other than perhaps that I critique, often heavily, the Reds' 2012-14 rugby and coaching performances vs providing celebrations of our endless goodness and potential to triumph as though we Reds Members should all be uniformly part of some kind of quasi-religous sect that principally exists to beam weekly spiritual love to the team) .

In that other post you mention I solely noted an interest in commenting upon early crowd numbers and comparing them to season-start Reds crowd levels in prior, recent years. I very clearly said therein that these observations may have no meaning or value to predict anything much, they were just isolated bits of data that attracted some attention from me. But I certainly am interested in all S15 and Wallabies' crowd levels trends as but one good proxy for both local State and national code health.

 

[USARugger]

Theoretically someone could run a scraper through ESPNs server and aggregate all the statistics they have recorded on there from the past 10+ years of tests.

Just saying.

 

[USARugger]

Really - wow!
Or are you talking about the annual beer boat race

When he was with Reds before going to Japan he was fastest player in the entire training group over 20m

 

[liquor box]

All of this talk about how the Reds appear to be poorly coached, and how RG is out of his depth is a bit short sighted. I think people forget just how experienced our backs coach Steve Meehan is. He was the backs coach of Stade Francais when they made the final of the French top tier three years running, he was also the head coach of Bath which won silverware in Europe. Stylesy too has had good feedback as a technical coach from the players.

Most importantly however is that they are all QLDers, with NS and RG being former players. They all would have grown up supporting QLD, and once they started coaching dreamed of coaching QLD. Now they have their shot, so let's get around them. We can definitely win in Durban.

Is being from QLD holding them back, before the revival of the Reds in the pat few years there seemed to be a lot of old boys and people who got their jobs due to their backgrounds and histories.

I may be wrong but didn't the Reds look a little bit outside the box and recruit from Victoria and AFL? Jim Carmichael seems to have worked out pretty well. Link seemed to work out and the influx of NZ Queenslanders has been pretty effective too.

I think the resurgence of Rugby in QLD has been due to having the foresight to seek input from outside the code and it's traditional base and try new things, proactively seeking memberships has been a real difference.

I think this concept of hiring people suited to the job is something the ARU need to look at.

Good luck to the current coaching team and I wish them all the best, but if the hiring had anything to do with who they played with or where they were born then I hold grave fears for the success we wish for.

 

[liquor box]

Forwards need more mongrel - to be led by Captain Kev - otherwise move over and give another fella a shot.

If my memory serves me correctly when Kev first became captain there was some concern that he had too much mongrel and would get himself in trouble. The thought was we needed a captain who was on the field and not in the sin bin.

We have never seen this anger return, I don't know if it his attitude or injuries that stop him playing an abrasive style of rugby.

 

[liquor box]

All stats are useless unless you look at them in context though, USAR. I'd guess most coaches keep a weather eye on players involvements and metreage nevertheless, it is after all a fundamental of the game; 'go forward' as it were.

Stats are always going to be affected by who you are playing against and who has been subbed in for a starter.

If every time you run the ball you are tackled by a Pocock, Gill or Sir Ritchie then I am guessing your ball retention stats would be lower than if you were tackled by other players. This does not mean you have terrible skills, but is a reflection or the work you do.

I think Deans said he liked to watch the area 10 metres from a ruck to see what involvement each player had and how likely they were to get involved.

If only there was a stat for effort and attitude

 

[humanbeast]

You can use statistics to prove anything