#Superugby predictions week 6: is quality of opposition relevant?

Our predictions were slightly below-par last weekend, getting 4 of weekend’s 7 games correct. Unfortunately two of our outside bets, the Waratahs and Stormers, ended up on the losing side.

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This weekend looks like an interesting bunch of games: the Crusaders and Bulls are favoured to win, by quite a margin and based on any of our criteria, but the rest of the games look much closer. Picking the Sharks to beat the Chiefs is a result of the Sharks hammering the Cheetahs in their last outing, and a bit of South African bias in the Superbru forecasts. Incidentally, we experimented a bit with weighting a team’s performance in the last game by the quality of the opposition faced, as measured by their current log standing. None of the predicted winners of the weekend’s games changed, so we’ve left things as is for now.

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As always, we’d like to hear your thoughts on the model?

 

Article summary: Anthropometry of Australian Rugby League rep players

This week’s article summary is courtesy the Manager of the High Performance Centre of the Sports Science Institute of South Africa, Justin Durandt.

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Article: Cheng, H. L., O’Connor, H., Kay, S., Cook, R., Parker, H., & Orr, R. (2014). Anthropometric characteristics of Australian junior representative rugby league players. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, Australia, 17(5), 546–551.

  • TAKE HOME MESSAGE
    • There are ethnic differences in body composition among elite junior players. These differences may give Polynesians a performance advantage and explain the high percentage of Polynesians in rugby League.
    • Polynesians exhibited greater height (181.0 ± 5.7 vs. 178.7 ± 6.3 cm), mass (90.6 ± 11.7 vs. 84.7 ± 11.1 kg), arm and calf girths, bone breadths and mesomorphy (7.6 ± 1.2 vs. 6.7 ± 1.1) than non-Polynesians (all p < 0.05)
    • 38% of the players in this cohort were Polynesians but they only make up less than 1% of the population
  • SAMPLE STUDIED (1 SENTENCE):116 junior elite U18 players
    • SPORT: Rugby league
    • LEVEL: Elite
  • LIMITATIONS OF STUDY: Sample size, only measured 166 out of 446 in the league. Low representation in specific positions
  • KEY RELATED RESEARCH
    • Malina, R. M. (2009). Ethnicity and biological maturation in sports medicine research. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 19(1), 1–2.
    • Zemski, A. J., Slater, G. J., & Broad, E. M. (2015). Body composition characteristics of elite Australian rugby union athletes according to playing position and ethnicity. Journal of Sports Sciences
      • “Elite Polynesian rugby athletes have different distribution patterns of fat mass and lean mass compared to Caucasians, which may influence their suitability for particular positions”.
    • Krause, L. M., Naughton, G. A., Denny, G., Patton, D., Hartwig, T., & Gabbett, T. J. (2014). Understanding mismatches in body size, speed and power among adolescent rugby union players. Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport
      • “The notion that bigger, faster, and more powerful characteristics occur simultaneously in adolescent rugby players was not supported in the present study. Current practices in body mass-based criteria for playing down an age group lack a sufficient evidence for decision-making. Dispensation solely based on body mass may not address mismatch in junior rugby union.”

 

 

A Blue Card for Rugby

This will be interesting to follow…

sportingjim's avatarClinical Journal of Sport Medicine Blog

All_Blacks_Haka “All Blacks Haka” by Sonya & Jason Hills from London, UK

Rugby is wildly popular in New Zealand, and that’s no news for anyone who follows sports.

It may be less appreciated how much medical research on rugby and other sports comes from the Land of the Long White Cloud.  The University of Otago in Dunedin, for instance,  conducts a good amount of research on sports medicine in general, and on concussions in particular.  Recently, the University hosted a conference entitled ‘Understanding sports concussion:  facts and fallacies.’

Our intrepid reporter from New Zealand, Dr. Hamish Osborne, is on the editorial board of CJSM and has previously done some guest blog posts when he was attending the annual ACSP conference in Australia.  He was one of the faculty at the Otago lecture and I asked him to share with us any of the important topics addressed .  What follows…

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