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Scoring Patterns in Rugby League
Author(s) -
Croucher John
Publication year - 1995
Publication title -
teaching statistics
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.425
H-Index - 13
eISSN - 1467-9639
pISSN - 0141-982X
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9639.1995.tb00865.x
Subject(s) - league , citation , library science , league table , computer science , economics , classical economics , physics , astronomy
IT IS well known that sporting data provide a rich source of information for lecturers and students for statistical analysis with virtually no limit to the amount of investigation that can be undertaken. Previous studies in this regard include Croucher (1981 and 1985 ) on tennis, Kimber (1993) on cricket, Mosteller (1970) on American football and Windle (1993) on horseracing to name but a few. One of the more popular international codes of football is rugby union where tournaments such as the five nations and World Cup in particular attract a great deal of interest. However, in 1908 a breakaway football code called rugby league was formed and has since developed into the main winter sport for many parts of Australia. It is also now a professional code which is played in a number of countries including New Zealand, Great Britain, South Africa, France, New Guinea and Fiji. The 13 a-side game is played in two 40 minute halves and scoring is done by: (i) a try (worth 4 points) (ii) a goal (worth 2 points) (iii) a field goal (worth 1 point) A goal may be kicked as a result of a try conversion or a penalty kick. Try conversion kicks may be taken in any position parallel to the sideline from where the try was scored. An odd scoreline can occur for a team only if they kick an odd number of field goals. The Australian Sydney based competition consists of teams who do not necessarily play each other twice but, for the most part, play half of their matches at home and half away. As well as being popular in its own right, rugby league is also a source of betting through the TAB (a Government betting Agency) where around $A20 million (or £9 million) per season is wagered legally on the outcomes of these games. Gambling options include trying to predict the exact score for each team in a game and selecting the winning teams (with points start taken into consideration) for all eight matches in a round. This paper considers some of the more interesting scoring patterns of 88 matches played by the 16 teams over 11 rounds during the 1993 season. To achieve this the analysis involved the construction of a database which included 40 variables and over 3500 data points. While space does not permit a listing of all the actual data, an idea of the type of information recorded is given along with suggestions how this may be used for teaching purposes.