Rugby league came back to life in 2022. After two years of pandemics and cancellations and postponements in 2020 and 2021, we finally got a real year of football. Super League / Challenge Cup English football tends to be a little repetitive with the same characters and actors shaping the season year-on-year. In 2022, as… Read More The Year in Rugby League Football, 2022, Part 2: The Northern Game
Imagine a professional sport. Let’s call it “non-association football”, or “football” for short. Every winter, the Board of Control for the Non-Association Football League Union (BOCNAFLU) holds an auction. Up for bid are sixteen licences to be sold. Each licence grants a football club one year’s participation in the most prestigious competition, along with a… Read More What’s next
Please, I’m begging you, stop saying Brodie Croft is good For a shining moment in 2017, Brodie Croft was the wunderkind heir apparent to Cooper Cronk at the Melbourne Storm. By 2019, the club had given him every oppourtunity, decided he wasn’t up to it and he was punted for Jahrome Hughes. Hughes, then a… Read More Please, I’m begging you, stop saying Brodie Croft is good (and other 2022 Super League stuff)
The Global Rugby League Football Club Rankings are back, baby, and even a global pandemic couldn’t keep us down for long. We skipped the rankings in 2020 due to the coronavirus wiping out most minor league football for the year and it would not have been that fun or interesting to rank the 16 NRL… Read More Toulouse Olympique are the 13th best rugby league team in the world
Note: this won’t include everything that happened in the world of rugby league in 2021. There’s been a focus on senior men’s and women’s thirteens football and, to avoid this post being infinitely long and dull, that means there’s no juniors, schoolkids and minimal nines content. I’ve farmed a lot of content from the APRL… Read More The Year In Rugby League Football, 2021
The move to do away with the ‘unlimited’ tackle rule that had been played in Australia for 59 seasons was the brainchild of the urbane secretary of the Rugby Football League in England, Bill Fallowfield. The move was designed to counter what Jack McNamara in the Manchester Evening News described as the ‘evils of the… Read More It’s not just the six again
We’re about a third of the way through the Super League season (maybe? Depending on covid and weather, I suppose) and it’s time to review how each team and player are performing. We’ll be looking at this using the following analytical tools: Form – Elo ratings that reflect short term performance. Production – The accumulation… Read More 2021 Super League WIP Report
People familiar with my philosophy will know that I put less stock in wins than most people. The binary nature – you either take everything or get nothing – means that a simple win-loss record is not a particularly nuanced and, unless you have a very long timeframe to work with, doesn’t necessarily reflect teams’… Read More Primer – SCWP
WCL is a means of estimating the probability of a team winning a rugby league match at a given point in the game. The WCL system finds all instances of a given margin at a given point in the game in that league and calculates how often a team in that position won the game.… Read More Primer – WCL
A big thank you to Lorna Brown (@_Lorna_Brown) who provided me with the dataset and whose ongoing updates to the same mean that we should be able to do some form of Super League player analysis. She has – presumably through some sort of black magic and/or competence with programming – managed to scrape a… Read More Primer – Rismans
Pythago NRL 