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Let’s go to the numbers, slice and dice them, put them on toast, and melt some cheese on them.
Four Super Rugby players have played every minute of their teams’ 2016 season thus far: all are backs. In fact, nine of the top 10 minute-playing guys are backs, far from the coalface.
A round of applause for Scott Fardy, the iron forward from Canberra, who has played all but eight minutes of the Brumbies’ season, and is seldom far from a conflagration. The next most overplayed forward is Reds ball carrier Hendrik Tui.
Michael Cheika might be a bit concerned: five certain Wallabies (if Nick Frisby is in) are in the top 20 of Super Rugby minutes played, while only Aaron Smith, Willie le Roux, and Beauden Barrett appear from the Springboks and All Blacks.
Forwards scrum, lift, and tackle more than backs; heavy minutes are more difficult to manage. When you look at the top ten in tackles completed, we find only two backs, the starting Sharks midfield (probably not a great sign for them).
Names you’d expect to see leap out in the tackles made category. Matt Hodgson (145), Michael Hooper (119), Ardie Savea (113), Sam Cane (113), and Sean McMahon (99), all are loose forwards doing their job very well.
But a few lesser-known loosies also appear. CJ Vellerman of the Kings has made 115 tackles, and Jean-Luc du Preez (one of the remarkable trio of Brothers du Preez) has completed 103 for the Sharks.
I was interested in marrying three statistical fields together (we’ll call it the Mormon stat): number of tackles completed, minutes played, and tackle success rate. If we do this, Hooper, Vellerman, and the Sharks backs don’t look as good. All tackle at less than a 90 per cent success rate (Andre Esterhuizen misses 18% of his tackles).
Also, when we look at tackles completed per minute of play, Esterhuizen, Paul Jordaan, McMahon, and fellow Rebel Luke Jones ball below the rate of the other top ten busy tacklers: 0.15 tackles per minute.
Thus, a 2016 best busy tackler list would have these 100+ tackle, 90 per cent or above, 0.15 tackle per minute players:
Matt Hodgson (91 percent, 0.19 tackles per minute)
Ardie Savea (90 percent, 0.15 tackles per minute)
Sam Cane (92 percent, 0.15 tackles per minute)
Jean-Luc du Preez (92 percent, 0.15 tackles per minute)
To make sure I was not being too blinded by stats, I took a look at master tackler Lappies Labuschagne’s tackle numbers. Labuschagne missed a large number of games, and thus may lead the league in tackles as he often does, but even in 431 minutes, he has completed 81 tackles at a 94 per cent success rate and matches Hodgson’s 0.19 tackle/minute work rate.
As a side-note, let’s sing “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” to Eben Etzebeth who has a tackle-per-minute rate above McMahon’s and just below Hooper’s, but has made 100 per cent of his 57 tackles attempted. The issue there is it’s impossible to fend him off.
Staying busy? Hodgson is also the only non-scrumhalf in the top 20 of ‘loose ball collected’ (he is twelfth with 26).
Turnovers won is always David Pocock’s category. He is even remarkable for his ratio of turnovers won (21) to penalties conceded (only 8); compare this to Hodgson’s ratio of 9 to 8 or Liam Gill’s 11 to 7. But what about backs?
Here we find that increasingly common breed of centre-flank hybrid that Nicolas Bishop wrote of recently; Andre Esterhuizen has won 14 turnovers and is the only non-forward in the top 20.
Catching kicks is primarily a job for the back three (Damian McKenzie has nabbed 54 and almost all the top twenty are fullbacks), but Luke Jones and Daniel du Preez both make the top 40 in kicks caught; Jones has caught 21 and du Preez has 19.
Usually, you want a back catching a kick because they are so much better at beating defenders or breaking the line into space. But a look at carries and clean breaks and defenders beaten stats reveals the forwards you want running at a defender with some room: Dane Coles, Ardie Savea, Tui, McMahon, and Jaco Kriel. Tui, McMahon, and Kriel beat defenders at a wing-like rate, and Hurricane mates Coles and Savea make clean breaks like centres.
For instance, Israel Folau has beaten 33 defenders on 114 carries; McMahon has beaten 37 with only 101 carries.
Similarly, Coles (13 breaks on 68 carries) and Savea both use fewer carries than Folau to break the line (but not as lethally as Joe Tomane, who only needed 50 carries to make 23 breaks, or Leolin Zas, who has 15 breaks on 44 carries).
Line breaks often come from an offload. To understand the effectiveness of our top offloaders, I married offload numbers to carry stats and knock-ons.
A few observations: a coach should want Kurtley Beale and Bulls fullback SP Marais offloading even more than they do (17.7 and 29 per cent of their carries, respectively, include a completed offload) because of their surehandedness.
Nemani Nadolo and Damian McKenzie, on the other hand, should probably offload less, and make sure of their target; they have committed 26 handling errors each, compared to stickier-handed high-offloaders James Lowe, George Moala, Beale, and Marais.
I looked at Kieran Read’s offload numbers because I seem to remember all of his offloads that beat the Springboks. He is very tidy with his choices, but he has only offloaded on 12.8 per cent of his 2016 carries.
Backs are penalised less than forwards. Of the top 30 penalty-conceders, at least half are props. The most penalised backs are Anthony Fainga’a (8) and Robbie Coleman (8), but Coleman has played 173 fewer minutes, so he has to win the prize for clumsiness.
Special mention should go to tighthead prop Vincent Koch, with only one penalty in 380 minutes of play.
Finally, Barrett has left 61 points on the field with missed kicks; might this result in Aaron Cruden keeping the All Black first five-eighths jersey, and Barrett remaining a late-game Bok-beating beserker?
Join The Roar rugby editor Christy Doran, former Wallaby Matt Toomua and a cast of regular and special guests as they look at the biggest issues in the game on The Roar Rugby Podcast. If you’re looking for great odds on the next game check out Aussie bookmaker PlayUp. Chances are you’re about to lose. Set a deposit limit.