The New Year is now well underway and rugby league tragics are eagerly looking forward to the new season.
Before we get to the real deal, we have the Auckland Nines, the Indigenous All Stars week and the World Club Challenge to whet the appetite.
Calling it the World Club Challenge is a bit of a stretch, but we’ll conveniently exclude the Americas, Asia, Africa, continental Europe and half of Australia to make it ok.
The Auckland Nines is to NRL like Twenty20 is to Test matches. The entertainment factor is high, there are many tries scored and a week after it finished, no one remembers who won. However we all have fun and it’s a low pressure environment to kick off the season for both players and fans.
Logically, it would be easy to suggest that there is no correlation between the Nines and the 17 man game in terms of success, and I should say that I totally agree with that.
However the stats suggest otherwise. Although the three years of Nines competition hardly make for an accurate sample size, we are going to run with it anyway.
The three winners so far have been the North Queensland Cowboys, the South Sydney Rabbitohs and Parramatta Eels. The three runners up have been the Brisbane Broncos, the Cronulla Sharks and the New Zealand Warriors.
So two of the past three NRL premiership winners have also won the Nines, while the other premiership winner finished runner up in the Nines. Still not convinced? Well, no, neither am I.
But when you consider that Brisbane have been a regular fixture at the top of the ladder and that Parramatta would have made the eight last year if they hadn’t breached the cap and paid a 12 point penalty, there appears to be some connection. The outlier is the Warriors, but they still munch down on a meal of kryptonite most times they cross the Tasman so we can’t really count them in.
Is this just a statistical anomaly or is there something in it?
It’s confused further when you consider that some of those teams’ stars haven’t actually taken part in these Nines wins. I can only put it down to a couple of rather tenuous links.
Firstly, you normally see a large proportion of younger players running around in the Nines before they play first grade. If these kids are good enough to create headaches in the Nines, they are also good enough to do the same in the NRL proper. Just look at what Valentine Holmes and Jack Bird did for the Sharks last year.
The second point would be that confidence seems to grow the more you win, no matter what you win, which may be a reason for the success in both.
This again may all be just a coincidence, it just depends on what side of the fence you are perched on.
If your team wins or comes second in February, its time to start thinking about tickets for grand final weekend. If your team is an also-ran, then you need to assume that there is no connection whatsoever.
The rugby league season is just around the corner. Bring it on!
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