When a coach arrives at a major league club, fresh and excited to make his own mark in the history books, you’d have to think that, as a minimum threshold for success, he’d want to leave the place in better shape than when he arrived. Sometimes, the vagaries of reality make it difficult to assess… Read More The coaches that fucked up your club
This article is about the northern hemisphere rugby league competition. For the short-lived southern hemisphere competition, see the League Digest podcast. To complement the complete histories of the NRL and the Queensland Cup, I humbly present the complete history of the northern hemisphere Super League competition. I will also, at no charge to you, include… Read More A Complete History of Super League
The current format of the NRL doesn’t allow for each team to play each other twice. Doing that would mean extending the season by another six weeks and, even if they players were up for that (which they are not), as an armchair analyst, I don’t think I could cope. This means that not every… Read More Who has the softest NRL draw in 2019?
Updated on the back of last year’s successful use of graphs to convey the historical progress of NRL clubs, this year’s complete history now includes the stats and Eratosthenes movements from the 2018 season for each club.
Last year, I did a report on each NRL club featuring a bit of history, a few statistics and some graphs. The series didn’t do super well in terms of clicks but also didn’t take a lot of effort to produce. One thing I did enjoy putting together were the class graphs. These use a… Read More A Complete History of the NRL (nerd edition)
Can we predict a premiership winner from their Elo ratings? Obviously, yes. That’s what the Stocky is for and this site would pointless if this was not true. But what if we wanted to look into the future before a single game has been played? I think that the Elo ratings of premiership winning teams… Read More Predicting this year’s NRL premiership winner with class
Background The Melbourne Storm were founded in 1998, in the immediate aftermath of the Super League-ARL dispute. Getting a team in Melbourne was a priority for Newscorp in order to expand the footprint of the game. Early financial concessions meant that the Storm won their first premiership in only their second season in 1999. Thereafter,… Read More Club Report – Melbourne Storm
Background Founded in 1908 as Eastern Suburbs, the Sydney Roosters are one of rugby league’s longest standing clubs. Playing out of Allianz Stadium, the Roosters (or Easts or City or Tricolours or Chooks) are one of the NRL’s success stories, having won thirteen premierships and nineteen minor premierships in their long history. More recently, Easts… Read More Club Report – Sydney Roosters
Background Wests Tigers have won one premiership. The year was 2005 and a young Benji Marshall side-stepped an entire league to lead his team to an extremely unlikely victory over grand final debutants, the North Queensland Cowboys. The Tigers had finished the regular season in fourth, behind the Eels, Broncos and Dragons. The Tigers were… Read More Club Report – Wests Tigers
Background What a team the Canberra Raiders were in the early 1990s. As one of the NSWRL’s first expansion teams in 1982, the Raiders made five grand finals between 1987 and 1994 (that’s seven years!). Of those five grand finals, Canberra won three of them in 1989, 1990 and 1994. Jason Croker, Mal Meninga, Ricky… Read More Club Report – Canberra Raiders
Pythago NRL 