Rugby has yet to reach its Moneyball moment. For anyone who hasn’t read the excellent book or watched the equally brilliant film, Moneyball looked at baseball and why teams persist in doing things the same way that they have always been done, despite those things actually having a negligible or even a damaging effect on performance.

Baseball is set up perfectly to delve deep into the statistics because they play 162 games in a season and a statistically sound amount of data can be found after that much play. Rugby doesn’t have the luxury of such huge quantities of data but it’s also much more fluid as a sport, and so almost every single piece of data exists in a world where it’s not isolated from what happened around it.

Take, for example, a missed tackle; that statistic doesn’t tell you whether the defender should’ve made the tackle or not, just that he missed it. To gain an easy advantage in rugby you need to look at an area of play which is barely affected by the opposition: the kick-off.

The kick-off has ceased to be an unopposed handover of the ball and is now as contested as any other part of the game. To look at how England used their kick-off in the first two games of the World Cup, I’ve plotted where each of them landed below.

England restarts vs Fiji/Wales

The white circles indicate the Fiji game and Wales are in red, and if England reclaimed the ball the circle has been filled in with light blue. Kick off ability has improved significantly in recent times and any ball placed between the 22 and 10 yard lines will usually arrive at exactly the same time as the onrushing cavalry of the kicking team. When England placed the ball in this area they won 4 from 4 challenges.

The next question to ask is how the receiving team respond once they get their hands on the ball. The kicking team “win” if the receiving team don’t get the ball beyond the halfway line.


Fiji restarts vs Australia

When Australia played Fiji, the Pacific islanders continually put the ball deep and left and then hoped to herd the World Cup runners-up into that corner. Any resulting kick will be from such a narrow angle that Fiji will make a net gain. Australia refused to play that way though and instead they moved it wide left, time after time, and ended up making a net gain. The arrows in the diagram above mark where the ball ended after two phases of play.


Uruguay restarts vs Australia

When Australia played Uruguay they were obviously facing weaker opposition and the kick-offs were therefore more varied and random. Uruguay kicked to the centre of the field which is inexcusable, as it provides two immediate attacking opportunities – and you can see above

So, to sum up, teams aim to gain an immediate advantage from a kick-off by either kicking long and banking on the receiving team losing yardage when they kick, or they try and win the ball immediately from the kick-off by hanging it high and short between the 22 and ten metre lines. Both are valid strategies, but require pinpoint work from the men chasing the ball.

Finally, some teams are turning the kick-off on its head. Australia’s American Football style ‘run-up’ was one example from the World Cup. However, revolution is also happening in Coventry with Wasps.

Wasps vs Exeter

Against Exeter on saturday they lined up for a normal kick to the right but instead Jimmy Gopperth flicked it to a team mate who immediately kicked left. Neither I, nor the commentators, had previously seen this before and as there’s nothing in the rules preventing it we might well see a lot more of it. If you can constantly keep the opposition confused without fogging your own brain you’ll win a lot more as a team.

By Sam Larner (@SamLStandsUp)