Always a Wasp

Being fun parents, we're taking the kids to Rome for a few days to eat their bodyweight in Pizza, Pasta and Gelato as well as watch England play a game that they might actually win.  Being disorganised parents, we completely forgot to book match tickets. 

Looking at the official ticketing sight, tickets in the side stands are firstly very limited (good for IFR) and also 95 euros or so, with the kids 50% off of that it's still 330 euros of tickets.  We'll likely plump for tickets in the corners, or behind the posts at 150 euros for us as a Family.

But, big question and what might change the appetite to double ticket spend, has anyone here been and are the stands as far behind the posts as it looks on the seating plans or is a seat midway up in the corners going to be a decent view like it would be at Twickenham?

Love it or hate it, Twickenham doesn't really have any 'bad' seats; you feel pretty close to the pitch wherever you're sat unlike, say, the Stade de France which feels miles from anything with the athletics track spacing around it (albeit that might have changed - I was last there in 2007).

The Good, The Bad and The Rugby Twitter account had the audacity to put a Tweet out showing an image of most England Caps for Front-Row forwards.

Their fatal error? They failed to reference that it was specifically the most England Men's Caps for Front-Row forwards and in the process of tweeting a picture not referencing omitted to list Rocky Clark as the most capped England player of all time.

Despite being one of the co-hosts and not the person who Tweeted it, Haskell had the finger pointed at him being told how disrespectful it was/is to Women and Women's rugby by Simi Pam, one of the Bristol Women's players.  He replied with "Have a day off" and rugby social media world exploded.

All seems a bit bonkers when the account and people everyone are suddenly up in arms about have a Podcast dedicated to Women's Rugby - The Good, The Scaz and The Rugby and also regularly invite currently Womens Players and ex-Players to participate in The Good, The Bad and The Rugby Podcast.

Saw this article in The Telegraph last week.  Thought it was a really interesting insight into how Borthwick has sought to objectively look at how his squad is built and for recruitment.  Would seem to have given them a competitive edge initially.  Also has some references as to how/why they might be looking at Jimmy:

If and when the time comes to cast Steve Borthwick’s biopic, it might not be Brad Pitt that lands the lead role. But the remarkable Leicester Tigers turnaround, and the razor-sharp recruitment driving it, is more than a little evocative of Moneyball.

After inheriting a bloated squad in the summer of 2020, Borthwick has leant on data science to cut away dead wood, streamline the wage bill, survey the market and pick up gems amid shrinking finances. Although there are many strands to the club’s resurgence – not least the coaching of his charismatic backroom team and the emergence of young stars like Freddie Steward – such a rebuild has been critical.

It is in this respect that Borthwick is channelling Billy Beane, the former general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team played by Pitt in the 2011 film of Michael Lewis’ book. Guided by data, he is daring to think differently while coveting less-celebrated attributes.

Leicester are leaving the crowd behind, in more ways than one. They head into this weekend with an eight-point cushion at the top of the Premiership table and topped their Champions Cup pool. So far, the season has brought 16 wins from 17 matches in all competitions.

“Rugby has a lot of entrenched views that have become gospel,” says James Tozer, the co-founder of Oval Insights. “There’s that great quote in ‘Moneyball’, where Michael Lewis is paraphrasing Bill James: ‘If you challenge the conventional wisdom, you will find ways to do things much better than they are currently done.’”

'Too much money was being spent on players who weren’t performing'

Tozer worked with Borthwick at the Rugby Football Union. When the latter was approached by Leicester, he asked Oval Insights to reshape Tigers with their machine-learning models. His brief was to revitalise a giant of English rugby that had fallen asleep and crashed to the foot of the Premiership table.

A month ago, when asked about the current salary-cap investigation into Leicester’s historic dealings, Borthwick highlighted the “mismanagement on and off the field” that he and chief executive Andrea Pinchen had to fix. In Tozer’s words, there was simply “too much money being spent on players who didn’t get a lot of game-time, or who weren’t performing at a high enough level”.

Oval Insights’ models yielded expected points, or xP, which Tozer labels “universal currency that we can use to measure player contributions” in major competitions around the world. Rob Lowe heads up the data collection operation, plugging into the archive of Stuart Farmer. Tozer calls those two “the godfathers of modern rugby stats”. 

Ranked databases divided by position, with “exchange rate” adjustments for different situations, provide a launchpad from which to attack inefficiencies in recruitment, such as reliance on familiar networks or ignoring the full breadth of the market. Leicester’s management team comprises Borthwick, Pinchen, finance director Fintan Kennedy, head of recruitment Richard Wilks and general manager Leigh Jones. Tozer says the process is “very rigorous” and that analytics helps unearth “hidden gems”.

“In lots of cases, we’ve found players who are being released by clubs when they have strong xP numbers, often for doing quite subtle things, such as important defensive interventions or valuable kicks,” he adds.

“As a result, every member of Leicester’s current squad has at least one skill for which they are in the top 25 per cent of global top-division players in their position. They all have their own strengths, and the coaching team have taken them to new heights.”

It is this part that really chimes with the Moneyball method, which championed unsexy baseball attributes such as a batter’s tendency to reach first base. Tozer insists it would be unfair to disclose unique selling points of individuals, but Leicester’s recent loan signing of Olly Robinson from Cardiff Rugby reeked of logic. As statistician Russ Petty has highlighted, the 30-year-old back-rower pillaged 70 turnovers between the 2017-18 and 2020-21 Pro 14 seasons. That put him in the top four for each campaign.

There are further wrinkles. Tozer believes Tigers have been innovative in assembling versatile players capable of switching positions. As well as in-game benefits, this mitigates the possibility of specialists being starved of game-time.

“We have also done a lot of modelling on how players transfer from one league to another,” he continues. “If you look at Leicester’s recruitment in the last two years, they’ve drawn from a really wide range of backgrounds. Take Hosea Saumaki: he had never played outside of Japan, and has now scored match-winning tries in two big European games [both against Connacht].

“Another problem is failing to understand player ability at the start and end of a player’s career. Leicester have produced a brilliant crop of academy players recently, which has made a big difference. They have also been very good at identifying which guys in their 30s are still performing close to their peak, helped by the genius of [head of performance] Aled Walters.

“In general, younger players have less data, so are harder to evaluate. But, as a supplement to our algorithms, Oval has created a global panel of expert talent-spotters to help track players’ potential better. That idea is borrowed from ‘Astroball’, another baseball analytics book.”

Following Tozer’s point on veterans, it is difficult not to let the mind wander again. Tigers have been linked with Jimmy Gopperth, the 38-year-old Wasps centre who would provide a distributing midfield foil to incoming fly-half Handré Pollard. Undeniably, Borthwick has brought tactical pragmatism to Tigers. Tozer, though, is keen to stress that faith in xP, which marks players down for mistakes, does not outlaw creativity.

“I think people have believed that xP would discourage players from trying anything ambitious,” he says. “The reality is that the system rates lots of ‘flair’ players very highly… as long as they do more good things than bad overall!”

'Devoting a little budget to analytics can save millions on salary'

Earlier this week, upon his ascension to power at Worcester Warriors, Steve Diamond suggested that recruitment will be more important under a restricted salary cap. Leicester were ahead of the curve in this regard.

“Without a salary cap, using analytics intelligently can get you a long way, but there are still lots of other factors at play,” Tozer explains. “If you look at football, Liverpool have essentially been perfect in every major recruitment decision for the last five years, and still only won one Premier League title, because they can be significantly out-spent by other teams.

“Having a salary cap equalises things further, so intelligent spending becomes even more important. Devoting just a little bit of budget to analytics can potentially save millions of wasted pounds on salary.”

From next season, clubs around the world will be able to buy Oval Insights’ player analytics. That arm of the business will be overseen by Dr Mark Einhorn, who was hired from management consultancy firm McKinsey. The vision is for the machine-learning xP tool to become commonly used across the sport, part of an exciting future for the company. Already the official data provider to the United Rugby Championship, they will expand their inventory next season. Oval validate their xP ratings using Superbru, the predictions website, for URC fixtures.

“We’re beating 99.8 per cent of the 36,000 fans taking part, and outperforming all other public prediction algorithms,” Tozer says. “We also run the model at international level, and our predictions were much more accurate than the betting markets in the autumn. For example, we had Ireland to beat New Zealand by five, when the bookies were strongly the other way.”

Tozer hastily points out that neither he nor his Oval colleagues are permitted to punt on matches. With their help, though, Leicester have become far safer bets over a new Moneyball story.

“I think there are some parallels with the Oakland A’s,” Tozer acknowledges. “Andrea, Steve and the management team at Tigers have been forward-thinking enough to question the status quo of an inefficient recruitment market.

“They made a huge number of changes in other areas outside of data, too, and the coaching staff deserve enormous credit for the on-field performance. It’s really a much broader story of institutional reform, of which data is one part. Regardless of where the Tigers finish this season, the transformation that Andrea has overseen in two years is pretty extraordinary.”

Just as satisfying for Tozer, you sense, is that the ripples of rugby’s data revolution could reach far beyond the East Midlands.

“From a statistical perspective, I’m sure some rugby fans will continue to think that it’s a load of nonsense,” he finishes. “But for those who are open-minded, it would be nice if Leicester’s rebuild could be something of a turning point in how rugby thinks about data.

“Used in the right way, it can be pretty powerful stuff.”

Couple of Articles lifted from The Telegraph that I thought made for interesting reading.  Have separated the posts to (hopefully) make it slightly easier to read

Ok, success is perhaps over-playing it as they haven't won anything (yet).  But thought this article from The Telegraph was really interesting:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/rugby-union/2021/06/16/revealed-secret-harlequins-stunning-revival/

For the past four months, more and more players have been donning white bibs at Harlequins’ training base at the Surrey Sports Park in Guildford. To the outsider the change of colour may seem fairly innocuous but its true meaning has not just helped change the club’s fortunes this season; it could signify a revolution in professional rugby.

The white bib is a sign that the player wearing it must not take any contact, a decision which is made by coaches monitoring impact data gathered by ‘smart’ gumshields. It has led to a reduction in contact by up to 900 per cent, a day’s less on-pitch training each week and an unprecedented drop in injuries.

If anybody was wondering how Quins managed to turn around their season, this is it. You would think that the club would be cagey about the secret to their success in the week of their Premiership semi-final against Bristol. But Danny Care, the scrum-half who is in the form of his life aged 34, is eager to explain. “I have seen ridiculous amounts of contact over my career,” Care says. “I feel a lot of it is unnecessary.”

This groundbreaking ‘less-is-more’ approach comes from players wearing Protecht gumshields, which are fitted with a microchip that monitors the collisions a player takes to both the head and the body. It is a British technology success story as they are designed by Swansea-based Sports & Well-being Analytics to create a database clubs can use to decide when players should rest.

Gloucester and Leicester are also using Protecht as are Welsh region Ospreys. But it is at Harlequins where the impact of the technology has been most stark.

From the beginning of the conversation, Care is adamant that player welfare demands that all clubs should adopt this technology. As a former team-mate at Leeds of Steve Thompson, Alix Popham and Dan Scarborough, who have all gone public with their battles with dementia, for Care, this is personal.

“I have spanned quite a lot of the professional era because I am so old now and a lot of the people who I have played with have mild forms of dementia from repeat concussions,” he says. “A lot of them are the guys who are going through the lawsuit. I played with a lot of those lads at Leeds, I know them personally and I know how rugby, the sport they loved and I love, can have really bad consequences on health.

“So having seen that happen first-hand to people that I know, when Protecht came and they had this invention that can fit into a gumshield that can monitor how hard people are getting hit, and how many times people are getting hit, I was like: ‘this is mind-blowing!’ Why didn’t we have this back when I started? How many of these lads wouldn’t have mild forms of dementia?

“As a rugby player, when you are training you don’t feel them [collisions], unless it is a big one. So to have that real time feedback you have taken too many hits is a massive game changer and I hope the whole league and other leagues of rugby all get involved in it.”

The long-term benefits are clear. But for Harlequins, there has been an immediate and profound impact. “My body at 34 feels a lot better than it did at 29, 30. I am not playing less rugby, I am maybe playing a bit more,” Care says.

“As you get a bit older you need to look after yourself more. I warm up a lot more than I did when I was younger. For me, taking out a lot of contact during the week has made me available for pretty much every game this year.”

As Mike Lancaster, Harlequins' head of medical services, explains, the introduction of reduced contact training is one of two major shifts at the club after the departure of former head of rugby Paul Gustard in January.

“What we are doing now, in terms of how we changed the amount of contact, is the second biggest change this season. We have more players available and fit. It has been a major factor for how we have performed.”

Care continues: “Mike, the medical team and the strength and conditioners and coaches have been great at listening to the advice, monitoring us, reducing the load and then we are getting more of our best players playing at the weekend. It isn’t rocket science. It is sensible, it is people’s lives, it is not just their rugby careers. The players are human beings who need their brains when they finish.”

Before speaking to Care, Lancaster suggests the 84-cap England international should be asked where thinks the technology could be used in the future. Again Care returns close to home, this time citing his experiences as the father of a rugby-playing child. His son Blake is six-and-a-half and his proud dad believes he “has something about him” and “could make a decent rugby player” - but, like many parents, he has concerns about the safety of the sport.

“The safety of rugby does scare me with him. If somebody said to me ‘would you rather your son play rugby or football?’ I would say football because I feel football is safer. But with Protecht coming into the game I genuinely think it is a game-changer.

“If even people like me are worried about their child playing, then maybe there is an issue. Hopefully, this is the start of something huge. I would love to be able to have this available for kids and to be able to speak to other parents.”

Returning to Harlequins and their meeting with league toppers Bristol on Saturday, Care believes the new approach to player safety, welfare and training load is part of a wider shift at the club he has called home for the past 15 years. “I think the environment over the last few years wasn’t true to what Quins really are,” he says.

“I think it was forcing us to be something that we are not. The last four or five months was about going back to what our DNA is and for me the key word about my time at Quins is fun. We enjoy ourselves. And that has been our buzzword, come into work, enjoy it, take the mickey out of each other, we train really hard and we have a lot of fun.

“We go out there and back ourselves. I have loved every minute of it and I would love to go for a title. That would be incredible from where we were five, six months ago.”

Last year, with less midweek training to account for games we shone.  This year, we've had lots of injuries - both soft tissue and major joints/tendons.  Lee has spoken about the players being emotionally fatigued but wonder if we've been over-training.  We beat Sale after a rest week and virtually no training.  Plenty of players have spoken about the impacts of being flogged in training week-in, week-out.

…Mako Vunipola, who has been consoling little brother Billy over his ‘devastating’ omission from the Lions Squad.

Given his form and suggestion that if Eddie were head coach instead of Gats they would have won the NZ your 3-0, it hardly comes as a surprise.

It’s not like it would have been a close call.  On form, surely you’d have had Dombrant and Hughes ahead of Billy and that’s just a couple of English players.

Billy doesn’t need good people surrounding him to move on.  He needs a bit of introspection and focus on his form.  Oh, abs don’t slag off the Head Coach of the previous tour. 

We’ve got BT Sport and Wasps have just emailed my Match Pass for the Quins game.

Is there a non-BT subscribing, non STH fan on here who would like the code to be able to watch the game?

Listened to Haskell's book over the past week or so (For free, thanks to the Libby App subscription that comes with Library membership).  I know he's a marmite character, but I like him. 

I don't agree with everything he says, but by and large, I think he's on the money with a lot of stuff - especially things that as fans, we don't always like to admit or discuss like the lack of loyalty from clubs to players (when we expect it back from players to clubs), the negative impact of the media and their necessity for sensationalisation, opinions on squads that are delivered as facts (fingers pointed at Brian Moore and Sir Clive Woodward particularly) how and why it's difficult it is to change tactics mid-way through a match compared to how easy most fans seem to think it is.

It's a light-hearted listen/read, but for me, a lot of the content seemed quite sombre with a lot of negativity he's had to deal with in his life that he's largely expected to just put up with:

-- The whole Wasps saga; being continually offered less-and-less with each contract and ultimately leaving to go to Stade because he was given a take-it-or-leave-it offer by Steve Hayes, not having image rights paid for 18+ months, being stripped of the Captaincy because of false allegations after the end of season Boat Trip and effectively just being dropped a few years ago with very little sentiment for his Wasps career - His boyhood club.

-- Personally paying for physio, psychology and rehab sessions because clubs either wouldn't have the budget, or take some things like mental health seriously.  He specifically cites the French Clubs as taken better care of medically that if a player wasn't fit they wouldn't get played and if a player was suspected to have an injury they'd get sent for a scan even if precautionary compared to UK clubs who supposedly have an MRI scan budget, which when it's gone it's gone, except for extreme circumstances

-- Being bullied for having other business interests beyond Rugby to give him an income after Rugby

-- A particular England coach going OTT in 'banter' about an ex-girlfriend who very publically cheated on him

-- His England debut soured during the build-up by the press spending most of their time writing about the video-tape incident at School (which gets explained and cleared up in the Book and is nothing like the press made out at the time even if it was a naive and dumb thing to have done)

-- The stream of online and offline abuse from 'rugby fans'

Obviously, this is very much his uninterrupted side of the story, but he speaks about his weaknesses/shortcomings.  Where he's learnt and things he'd have done differently.

Ultimately, he came across as someone who has worked bloody hard for their whole career, tried not to take themselves too seriously, has had to manage the flood of negativity that's come his way and has thought diligently about life after rugby - both in terms of things he'd enjoy doing and things that would give him an income.  In the process he's racked up Club Captaincy, nearly 80 Caps for England played in the Premiership, Top 14, Japan, and the Super 15 (or 14 as it might have been then).  Been on a Lions Tours (but doesn't consider himself a Lion as he didn't play in a Test), won the Grand Slam, Premiership and the Heineken Cup. 

Right at the end he is talking about online abuse from people and two incidents in particular.  One, it transpires, is from a group of school kids and after they don't give up with the abuse he contacts the Headmaster, explains the situation and asks to come into the school to speak to them. 

The Headmaster agrees and Haskell goes with Chloe.  Rather than berating the kids or seeking to intimidate them, he talks to them about the impacts of abuse on people and the longevity of social media - that what happens in 5-10 years when they're applying for University places, or Jobs and people check back through Social Media.  That these things live the public domain for years typically.

The other he admits that if it wasn't for Paul Doran-Jone's wife, probably wouldn't have ended so well - both for the abuser, or Haskells career.  Everyone has their limits, I guess.

As a Wasps fan, it's definitely worth a listen or a read.

ps There's also the story about a house-party in NZ that goes wrong with our very own Lima Sopoaga ending up KO'd