What Can We Expect From the Australian Local Derbies?

FatProp recently started a thread on the G&GR Forum titled “All These Australian Local Derbies … Better?”.  The general thrust of the comments in response was that based on Super 14 games between the Australian teams, we may see games played in a less adventurous manner than when the Australian teams are playing teams in the other conferences. Read the comments here.

I think that teams will probably start out the season looking to play positive rugby but after the first three or four weeks we might start to see the teams that have collected a good haul of points already playing a more conservative game to try and consolidate their position near the top of their conference table.  The teams that have dropped a lot of points early in the season may have to become more adventurous to try and earn bonus points to catch up.

Getting back to the main point made by FatProp and others, that in the past, local derbies have tended more often than not to be tight slogs, I decided to take a look at the statistics from the 2010 Super 14 season.

To see if the statistics reveal any differences in how open the games between the Australian teams were compared to games played against the non-Australian teams, I’ve looked at the amount of ball movement, the number of offloads, the metres gained running the ball, the number of line breaks, the number of tries scored and the percentage of points scored from tries.

The raw data comes from Verusco and shows an interesting pattern across all four of the Australian teams.  The statistics certainly support the view that the Australian teams played with less ball movement and played more cautiously when playing against other Australian teams than when playing against non-Australian teams.

Of course, statistics aren’t everything and there may be other factors involved but the numbers for each team below make for some interesting reading.