Statistically your side has bugger all chance in 2016

It’s hard to believe but the 2016 season is less than a month away. Soon we’ll be seeing footballers on TV doing what they’re meant to do: playing football.

And it will be real football, not some pre-season rubbish that unnecessarily risks your side’s precious cattle.

Think about it, if pre-season comps were such a great idea, why is it nobody else has them? None of the NFL, NBA, Major League Baseball, EPL, La Liga, Serie A or Bundesliga would dream of making their sides go through a farce like the Auckland Nines or AFL’s who-gives-a-damn cup.

Every year some poor team – this year the Manly Sea Eagles – cop bad injuries attending these meaningless competitions and every year we wonder at the point of it.

Football is a business and pre-season competitions are bad for business. Any side with half a brain protects their key players by keeping them home. So we don’t see many stars anyway because they’ve got a ‘niggle’ or some such story.

If we want to do pre-season let’s do it Hunger Games style. Each side has trials for the final spots in their squads. The teams they send to Auckland should be the last 15 standing from these trials.

Those players have the chance to go out and impress on the big – or semi-big – stage in NRL team colours to ensure we still have allegiance and interest. That way we’d see full on, no holds barred games, and probably the birth of new star players.

And if a player got injured, well it’s still sad, but it doesn’t affect your actual squad.

As for the Indigenous All Stars game, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander players are an ornament of the great game of rugby league. Every single first-grade side features superb Indigenous players and has since I started watching in the 1970s. And they are arguably the best players, like Johnathan Thurston and Greg Inglis.

However, who can remember the last time the two named sides for the Indigenous All Stars game looked anything like the sides that actually took the field? Once more injuries and niggles rob both sides of the best players.

If we want to honour the first Australians’ role in rugby league properly we should hold the match a week after the grand final. That way we’d likely get two great sides playing out a great game, rather than second and third choice players. And if someone gets injured the next season is five months of recovery time away.

Pre-season comps are just an unnecessary risk because, let’s face it, it is bloody unlikely that your side is going to win the premiership in any given year already.

Copping injuries in pre-season games just makes the job even harder.

On the most basic statistic – one side out of 16 must win – your side has just 6.25 per cent of winning in 2016.

Here are some stats that show just how remote most side’s chances are:

• Of the 246 sides that didn’t make the finals the previous season during the history of the NRL, only 23 (9.3%) have made the top four the following season.

• In the 18 seasons of the NRL to date 100 per cent of the premiers have finished in the top four.

• Further, in only three of those 18 seasons (16.6%) was the premier not a finalist in the previous season (Penrith 2003, Wests Tigers 2005 and Roosters 2013).

• In fact only six of those premiers (33%) finished outside the top four the previous season.

• In only six instances (33%) has the runner-up been from outside the top four. In only three instances (Parramatta 2009, Roosters 2010 and Bulldogs 2012) were the season’s runners-up not in the previous years finals.

So the chances of Manly, Canberra, Penrith, Parramatta, Warriors, Titans, Wests Tigers and Newcastle this year would seem remote at best, especially the Raiders, Titans, Wests Tigers and Newcastle as 60 per cent of the time the premier has played in a decider within the past six seasons. The Raiders haven’t played in a preliminary final since 1997, almost 20 years ago.

• Only one premier – Brisbane in 1997-1998 – can sort of lay claim to winning back premierships during the NRL era.

• In fact on only seven occasions (39%) has the premier from the previous year made the top four. So the Cowboys’ back-to-back chances are statistically poor.

• In only six instances (16.6%) have teams that played in the previous year’s grand final played in the next.

• On only two occasions – Melbourne 2007 and Manly 2008 – has the runner-up from the previous season won the premiership. So Brisbane’s chances look slim too.

So, after all that doomsaying, who statistically is a good chance of winning in 2016?

Given the above stats, it will most probably be one of the following sides lifting the trophy at the end of the upcoming season: the Roosters or Storm.

We’ve got a long way to go but I’ll be interested to see if these stats prove correct!