Koppy's stats are way ahead of the other forwards for the meters made, disappointing Tom B only had 6 carries in the stint he was on.

You won't make many metres when you constantly run into the markers. You get told not to do that at under 8's.

Far too many missed tackles again. It's rather pathetic TBH

Wow, interesting stats, and they bear out what a lot of people have been saying on here all week

Kopczak was head and shoulders above the rest of the pack in terms of attack. Scruton did very little, Sibbit might as well not been on the field as an attacking threat - he must have been hiding whenever we had the ball in hand! Donaldson, not much better, even Langley had poor stats for go forward.

Clearly the whole pack, except Kopczak who will doubtless give his all for cause again, need to seriously up their game on Sunday.

errr...excuse me, but I think you are losing sight of the wood for the trees. We had to do 364 tackles, they had to do 259. so of course theres going to be a bit of a shortage on the carries and metres gained front. and when you standardise the data above, eg metres per carry, tackles per game etc, there are almost no surprises at all from last season. Of the props Koppy and Tom make the most metres per carry, Scruton Hargreaves the least but making most tackles per game. The one big surprise is Langley making far more metres than usual, 8 metres a carry compared to Koppys 7.5. So Sibbit, 43 tackles, Donaldson 45 tackles no wonder they had nothing left for go forward. looking at it the one player well below his own standards is Scruton, on those stats is he truly fit?

Don't forget that one of Langley's carries will have been for his try, which was probably about 25 yards, so his average will be slightly skewed by that.

Without sounding like too much of a pedant, is there not a way to tabulate the data a bit better than that? I find it really hard to read.

In terms of metres per carry you also need to consider a few things. Is Hargreaves on play 1 or 2 doin the hard work straight off the ruck into an organised blitz wall of defenders in the middle of the park as likely to make as many metres per carry or win the collision as say Langley chiming in on play 3 or 4 a little bit wider, with a bit of ruck speed at a less solid defence?...I think not. Statistics need to be taken with a realistic pinch of salt.

Copy and paste it into notepad, it comes out fine.

thats why trying to work with just one match's data is dodgy in extremis, and why trend analysis is more important hence comparison with previous years, and enable analysis of the sort mentioned by Biff, as to who is doing what differently etc. The uninteresting raw statistics themselves are the starting point of the interesting bit of analysis and understanding, not the end of it. If you buy a book do you say you are not going to read it because those words can mean different things? No, you read it and the narrative provides the context within which to understand any ambiguous bits. and its the same with numbers, what is the context? you can read the story of the game by comparing two sets of stats, Gales and Dureaus to see which one was playing behind a winning pack.

Does anybody know the answer to this one: Gale carried a 1.7 metres on average. is that because he kicked most of the time, and do the opta metres include the distance the ball was carried by those kicks, ie the distance from where he kicked to where the next play starts? The SL stats also include attacking kicks, kicks in general play, but that is too simplistic a statistic.

He came on with 5 to go in first and was off 10 mins into second, not much time to do anything really!

the opta tackles stats above dont quite match up with the SL site, which for Burgess gives 11 tackles made 3 missed = 30% missed tackle rate.

I took them from the SL website but there may be some mistakes as I'm using the smallest laptop known to man and it's a bit difficult to use.

As for copying it over so it's easier to read it's beyond my techincal abilities!

He came on for koppy on 29mins..disappointed that we only used 9 subs tho.

Agree Koppy stats look good going forward. Hopefully this will be the year he finally kicks on. Actually runs onto the ball and not inthe markers. If the other forwards did that we wouldn't be in such a bad position.

Still needs to work on his defence though, think he got caught out twice with a simple side step, both resulted in tries. But going forward he's our best player so far.

I hope no criticism was implied as I know what its like trying to get the data into a sensible shape. it was just the missed tackles that were wonky. One thing i have done for my own website is to format data in an excel table, cut and pasted that into Adobe fireworks as that gives the best resolution then saved as a jpg file, but you can paste it into Word then save as image but at lower resolution, and put the image up on the website. other graphics packages should do the same as Fireworks. Where did you get the opta stats from? when I've done an analysis ive copied player by player off the SL site and pasted into excel with the standardisation formulas set up alongside. it was a pain to set up but not so bad to do subsequently. So if you have another source that would be easier to capture, that would be good. Trend data could easily be provided by this season and comparatives for 2011 2010 as a starting point for the discussion. cant wait to see what today has done for the stats and Ian motormouths temper.

I was with you right up until that bit!

All I do is copy the figures from the stats on the SL website onto a pad then type them in word then cut and paste onto here. It sends the formatting a bit mad but it's the best I can do with my limited IT abilities!