A young man is told by his village: “Go north, over the mountains, and return with a young woman to be your wife; be sure she is beautiful, but also brilliant. She must be smarter than anyone else. But also very pretty.”
Which trait do you think he is more likely to focus on?
Rugby commentators speak often of work rate. “He’s got a motor!” Clearly, stamina and the willingness to get busy is important in rugby. An eighty-minute player who can attend as many contact zones as possible enables the team to keep chugging away.
World Rugby’s statisticians tend to feature volume of work. They portray ‘number of times over the gain line’ as a virtue in and of itself. Or carries. Lineout catches. Metres run. Tackles made as a gross total.
That’s just being pretty. The lad goes and finds the prettiest lass he can find; brains may or may not come with it.
I like statistics that honour efficiency and the context of the player’s positional requirements.
So, who were those smart and pretty players in the 2015 Rugby World Cup?
I can’t promise you an official list of the ‘Busiest Players who Were Also Good at Being Busy and Busy Being Very Good’, because:
– Scrumhalves are always busy and so I’m leaving them out;
– Props have to lift people and scrum and that’s busy in its own way;
– Fullbacks can run 20 metres any time they want to, after a kick.
But here are some players who were busy and efficient; hot and smart:
Busy tacklers who still made their tackles
Tackling involves a choice. Some players hide. Some players lag. Others roam.
Here are the players who made 50 or more tackles at an 85 per cent rate or higher, ranked in order of how many tackles they made per minute of play on the field:
1. Dan Lydiate (0.25 tackles/minute at 90 per cent rate)
2. Jonny Gray (0.24 tackles/minute at 97.1 per cent rate)
3. Lood de Jager (0.19 tackles/minute at 93.9 per cent)
4. Thierry Dusautoir (0.17/91.6%)
5. Schalk Burger (0.16/88.2%)
6. Eben Etzebeth (0.15/96.1%)
7. Michael Leitch (0.15/89.4%)
8. David Pocock (0.15/86.7%)
9. Sam Warburton (0.14/91.5%)
10.Francois Louw (0.14/87.5%)
Michael Hooper, Richie McCaw, Scott Fardy – and Nicolas Sanchez of all people – are just outside this list.
A few things that occur to me. Three locks (two of them, the South African youngsters, very tall) show up on this tackle volume and efficiency list, and their tackle success rate was the highest. I can guarantee you there would not have been three lock leaders in this stat before the professional era.
The other seven are loose forwards, but several of those are pilfer artists, including Pocock, Louw, Dusautoir, Warburton and McCaw.
If we raise the bar to 90 per cent tackling and 0.15 tackles/minute, the best are Lydiate, Gray, de Jager, Etzebeth, and Warburton.
Turnovers are cancelled out by penalties
The most efficient pilferer in this tournament was Damian de Allende, who won nine turnovers but never conceded a penalty. The highest volume pilferers were Pocock (17) and Louw (13). For being so ‘pretty,’ Pocock was also very smart.
The turnover-to-penalty ratios of the top pilferers:
de Allende 9:0
Pocock 17:3
Nakarawa 9:3
Warburton 7:3
Dusautoir 9:4
Louw 13:6
McCaw 7:7
Heavy carriers who make it over the gain line
There is value in a guy who can truck it up fifteen, twenty times a game; even if he doesn’t break the line. But again, we want a pretty genius, a lovely bookworm.
Who made the grade?
So, here are the heaviest carriers of the ball, if they made it across the gain line at least 40 per cent of the time:
Burger (0.2 carries a minute/40% gainline success)
Leitch (0.18/60%)
Levanini (0.18/42.1%)
de Allende (0.14/49.1%)
Israel Folau (0.14/47.1%)
Ma’a Nonu (0.14/41.5%)
de Jager (0.13/52.9%)
Vermeulen (0.13/44.6%)
Kieran Read (0.12/59%)
Etzebeth (0.12/46.5%)
Kaino (0.11/43.8%)
This list is immediate recognisable as busy players. Others who narrowly missed out were Hooper, Fardy, Dusautoir (who had a phenomenal 68 per cent gain line rate, but did not carry enough), Lydiate, Warburton, Pollard, and Sam Whitelock.
If we shrink that list down to 45 per cent or better at gain line success, we have this order of merit:
1. Leitch
2. de Allende
3. Folau
4. de Jager
5. Read
6. Etzebeth
All rounders
Already, the eye is drawn to de Jager’s presence on both the ‘efficient tackle per minute’ and ‘good carries per minute’ lists. Others are Leitch, Etzebeth, and Burger.
Damian de Allende, Louw, McCaw, and David Pocock show up on both the tackle and turnover ratio list.
Read pops up on many of the lists, too.
Loose ball collected
Ben Smith was a livewire, collecting 19 loose balls; but so were Read, McCaw, Cordero, Tuculet, and of course, Pocock.
Busiest players who were good at being busy and busy at being good
With the caveat that this article is not addressing scrumhalves and props, I think if were picking five very busy and very efficient players; five knockouts with brains, we’d eliminate the busiest of all (Burger) because his gainline success was too low, and he only won one turnover.
We’d also cut Jonny Gray, because he had the worst gain line rate of all the busy players (19.2%). That would be Fardy’s problem too (34.2%). We’d ignore any player who didn’t make at least eight tackles a game at a 90 plus percentage rate. We’d want him to have a go at the turnover, but not conceding too many penalties.
Dusautoir had brilliant efficiency, but needed Burger’s work rate.
So, we are left with Leitch, Etzebeth, de Jager, Pocock, and Read.
The mad statistician (who is both mentally and physically lovely) has spoken again.
