🏉 Test hopeful Henry Pollock brings youthful energy — and inexperience — to the Lions pack
My Week in Sport(s) 🏉 ⚽️ 🏏 ⚾️ ⛳️
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
Covered in this edition: 🏉 Henry Pollock, ⚽️ Iceland, ⚾️ Elly De La Cruz, 🏏 Shafali Verma and ⛳️ Aldrich Potgieter.
🏉 Test hopeful Henry Pollock brings youthful energy — and inexperience — to the Lions pack
I don’t often look for chances to combine my interest in sport with my day job as a financial journalist, but the ongoing British and Irish Lions tour of Australia — sponsored by insurance broker Howden — was too good an opportunity to miss.
In researching a piece on the value of such sponsorship deals to financial firms, I was reminded of just how different a proposition the quadrennial tour is to most of the rest of the men’s rugby calendar. The level of attention on the team and its fixtures against the sport’s traditional powers dwarfs interest in the domestic game in the United Kingdom. As a result, a tour can serve as a star-making vehicle. This year, 20-year-old England back-rower Henry Pollock is the obvious candidate to steal the spotlight.
If selected against Australia, Pollock will become the youngest test-match Lion of the professional era. You won’t miss him, either: he does the most visible things that a player can do — carry the ball when his team has possession, and tackle the ball-carrier when they don’t — more frequently than anyone else the Lions have selected at his position. In domestic rugby this season, he averaged 30 combined carries and tackle attempts per 80 minutes; no other back-rower selected recorded more than 27.
Pollock has kept this high rate of activity up so far on tour, too. In the two warm-up games he has played, he has averaged 33 such on-ball involvements per 80 minutes — and the Lions’ other back-row forwards have averaged just 22. Why is he not a guaranteed test starter, then? Data from Opta on the effectiveness of his actions provides a clue. While he carried the ball the most among this six-player cohort this season, his carries were graded as ‘dominant’ less frequently than anyone else’s.
He was also the least effective of these players at clearing attacking rucks; on the other side of the ball, his tackling and breakdown work were graded as below-average. Part of this will be his relative lack of physical maturity; he should learn to pick his spots better as he ages, too. Young athletes develop quickly, though, and these season-long aggregates might undersell Pollock’s current level of ability. If he’s picked to play under the bright lights, we might just find out if he’s ready to be a star.
⚽️ Iceland — and their excellent goalkeeper — could cause a major upset at Euro 2025
What’s one common formula for a footballing upset? You can ask fans of the USWNT. They exited the last World Cup after a defiant performance from Sweden goalie Zećira Mušović, who made 11 big saves in their round-of-16 encounter in 2023.
Could any team follow this formula at Euro 2025? Really, it’s hard to look past Iceland. Over the last few years, they have a decent record against the ‘top eight’ teams at the tournament I analysed last week — and, crucially, their goalkeeper might be the best of any team’s. The table below ranks every goalie at the tournament by the number of goals they have saved above expected in top-level matches since Euro 2022 — where data is available — adjusted for the number of shots on target they have faced.
Cecilía Rán Rúnarsdóttir of Iceland and Inter Milan immediately stands out. A necessary caveat, though: goalie performance is volatile — especially in the women’s game — and we’ve only got one full season of Rúnarsdóttir in a top league to judge. If they finish second in their group, Iceland would likely face the world champions in the quarters. Spain would hope that there’s some air in the Iceland star’s shot-stopping numbers — but neutrals should keep an eye on this one possible path to a huge upset.
What else I learned last week
⚾️ In 2025, Elly De La Cruz is making better contact with a slower swing
As we examined back in March, young Dominican baseball star Elly De La Cruz looked unique among switch-hitters in his first couple of MLB seasons: he swung the bat much faster from the left-hand side than from the right.
That gap, however, has narrowed significantly — from a 3 mph difference last year to below 1 mph so far in 2025. Things have changed on both sides of the plate: the average speed of Elly’s left-handed swing has fallen by 1.2 mph, while his right-handed swing has increased by 1 mph. Interestingly, this has coincided with an improvement in the quality of his contact with the ball. 14.9% of his batted balls so far this year have been ‘barrels’ — up from 13% last year, and just 9% in 2023.
🏏 Shafali Verma’s boundary-hitting ability has regressed for India
The Indian women’s team’s tour of England is off to a successful start, with wins in both of the first two T20Is against the hosts. They’ve posted big scores along the way — but one of their young stars has continued to struggle at the top of the order.
As we saw earlier in the year, Shafali Verma is pretty clearly the best boundary-hitter in the Women’s Premier League. In the last couple of years, though, she’s struggled to replicate that form in the international game. Between 2019 and 2022, her effective boundary rate was 9.3 percentage points better than the average of other batters in matches she played against other top nations. However, Verma’s hitting has since regressed: her EB% is only 1.3 points better than her peers over the last three years.
⛳️ 20-year-old South African Aldrich Potgieter is already elite off the tee
Aldrich Potgieter recorded his first PGA Tour win last weekend in a dramatic playoff. As Justin Ray of Twenty First Group noted, he joined an exclusive list: only four other players from outside the United States have won on tour before their 21st birthday.
While his overall game remains unpolished, the South African is one of the longest players in men’s golf already. According to Data Golf’s ‘adjusted driving distance’ metric, he hits the ball 25 yards further than tour average off the tee, trailing only Bryson DeChambeau. In fact, Potgieter hits his driver so cleanly that he’s already one of the 10 best players off the tee in Strokes-Gained terms — despite finding the fairway considerably less frequently than the average tour pro.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Friday July 11th.
