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Opinion
Before any Wallabies squad was picked, another carefully coordinated release of info last week revealed what we all suspected to be true: Super Rugby Pacific games are being played in a quicker timeframe, games are getting moving sooner, and the average points per game has gone up significantly.
The release of the information, via SANZAAR, Rugby Australia and New Zealand Rugby at 10:01am last Thursday, carried the same headline and painted the same picture:
“Law variations inspire record scores and reduced stoppages in Super Rugby Pacific.”
The crux of the release was one of time no longer lost and of lost time drastically reduced.
Time taken to restart after tries, for substitutions, and for the handing out of warnings and final warnings and this-time-we-really-mean-it final warnings, and of actual cards has all been cut pretty much in half.
Total elapsed time in games, from kick-off to the final whistle, has been reduced by more than six minutes on average, from 98 minutes down to 91 minutes, 46 seconds.
The big one was average points per match: up from 53 points per game in 2022 to 61 points per game this season.
When the law variations were announced, expectation was around a probable increase in ball-in-play (BIP) time, but this significant drop in total elapsed time has been the major win. It also kills off the ‘stop the clock’ line of thinking as a way of regaining lost time in games.
BIP was noticeable for its absence in Thursday’s announcement. All the conversations I’ve had and anecdotal evidence I’ve heard has suggested that BIP has increased – albeit more in NZ games, than those played in Australia – but the lack of mention among this information drop only leads me to wonder if BIP perhaps hasn’t changed that much at all.
If it had gone up in line with these other little wins, I’m sure it would’ve been mentioned.
But as I wrote after Round 1, while ever total elapsed time is so significantly down, BIP increases (or not) don’t actually matter. Reducing total elapsed time is having the same expected effect, and the fatigue factor is definitely there in games.
(Photo by Hannah Peters/Getty Images)
With these figures confirming everything suspected, I did start wondering about which teams had been the best at taking advantage of the fatigue factor in games and which teams seem to be having the most trouble with it.
There would be a couple of measures that could apply – penalties conceded being one, certainly – but given the average points per game was a major element of the announcement, I figure tries scored and conceded late in games would be a pretty fair indication as well.
After all, as defences tire, more tries have to be scored and conceded. But who does it best? Or worst?
With average points per game up, it’s worth adding here that number of tries scored have shot up as well.
Whereas last year we saw 6.9 tries per game scored, this season it’s up to 8.4 tries per game. In 2022, 625 tries were scored across the 91 games, and in 2023, we’re already up to 301 after 36 games.
For like-for-like purposes, the first six rounds last season saw 230 tries scored, also across 36 games.
And three teams in the top eight with negative for-and-against records suggests that defences certainly are tiring.
But what constitutes ‘late in games’? You can’t just call it the last ten minutes, because games are opening up much earlier than that, and you similarly couldn’t just call it after halftime either.
So for the sake of creating a mark somewhere, I’ve drawn the line after 55th minutes, by which point most teams seem to be well into their bench use this season.
But the first thing that became apparent in counting tries scored in the last 25 minutes was that a surprising number of tries have been scored in the 54th minute of games this season! Like, upwards of a dozen. Nevertheless, they’ve not been counted in what follows in this exercise.
There were a few things to conclude. Seven teams – the Blues, Chiefs, Fijian Drua, Highlanders, Melbourne Rebels, Queensland Reds, and NSW Waratahs – essentially score the same number of tries in the last 25 minutes of games as they concede. Some of them will score one or two more, the others concede one or two more, but they’re essentially break-even over the closing stages.
Three teams really put the foot down, and two of them make sense. The Brumbies have scored 40 per cent of their season’s tally of tries in the final 25 minutes or games, and the Hurricanes have scored 46 per cent of theirs.
The third one is really interesting: the Western Force have scored 13 of their 23 tries (57%) late in games. They’ve scored nine tries in the last 25 minutes of their last three losses alone. Maybe games aren’t long enough for them.
At the other end of the scale, it probably won’t be too surprising to read the winless Moana Pasifika have let in 17 of their 41 tries (41%) in the closing stages, but it might be surprising to read that the Crusaders have conceded half their tries (nine of 18 conceded) in the last 25 minutes – though it is only three in the last three games.
The Hurricanes have similarly conceded half their tally (also nine of 18) in the closing stages, too.
Some other observations:
What it amounts to is bench depth, how teams are using their replacements, and how well teams really can ‘play out the full 80’.
Seven of the 12 teams concede more than a third of their tries in final 25 minutes of games, but three of those seven teams also happen to be the three-top teams from New Zealand. In total, 35 per cent of all tries scored in 2023 have come in the last 25 minutes in games.
Fatigue is affecting different teams different ways, clearly.
What will be interesting to watch over the remaining rounds will be to see whether teams can gain late-game fitness and actually reduce the number of tries they concede over the closing stages of games.
Or, indeed, whether games open up even further.