⛳️ Golf is now hard work for Tiger Woods. Was it always going to end this way?
⛳️ Golf is now hard work for Tiger Woods. Was it always going to end this way?
My Week in Sport(s): the last act of a golfing great, Barça Femení's attack and Reece Walsh
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
⛳️ Breaking down the different phases of Tiger Woods’ career
⚽️ Barcelona trying to stay alive in the UWCL
🏉 Reece Walsh, the most exciting ball-runner in rugby?
⛳️ Golf is now hard work for Tiger Woods. Was it always going to end this way?
The image of Tiger Woods giving his post-round interview on Masters Sunday 2024, drenched in sweat, will stay with me for a long time.
It made explicit what is implied by his recent on-course scores — and what would have once been remarkable to say about him.
Professional golf is now pretty hard work for Woods.
It’s unlikely to be relevant to whether or not he appears at the competition in June, but it’s certainly notable that Woods doesn’t actually qualify for a spot in this year’s US Open on merit:
Nonetheless — as he stated at Augusta — he is keen to keep playing in every Major he can for the foreseeable future.
And the 2024 PGA Championship — at Valhalla, where Woods won in 2000 — is coming up in three weeks’ time. It’s an interesting point at which to reflect on this version of Tiger, and how his current skills measure up to those he wielded in his prime.
Even after accounting for Scottie Scheffler’s current run of form, Woods’ peak skill level — as measured by Data Golf — is still laughably far above everyone else in golf’s modern era.
For context, Scheffler has averaged +3.5 True Strokes-Gained — a metric which uses the average PGA Tour professional as its benchmark — so far in the 2024 season.
Tiger recorded seven full seasons at or above that mark relative to his peers, according to Data Golf.
But it’s fair to say that his prime already seems like almost a lifetime ago, in sporting terms. His last year at or above Scheffler’s current level was the 2009 PGA Tour season.
This April’s Masters also marked five years since he won his last Major Championship — and, in his return to Augusta, he lost around 1.5 strokes per round to the average player.
The most important event of that five-year period happened far from the golf course, though.
Woods’ professional history has been punctuated by a number of serious injuries, but those he sustained in his 2021 car crash were unlike any of the others he’d recovered from in the past.
He has been unable to play much golf at all since he returned to the course in April 2022 — but the picture that does emerge from his sporadic outings is a stark one.
ShotLink data for the PGA Tour — which allows for more granular analysis of where on the course players are gaining or losing strokes to their peers — is available from the 2004 season onwards.
From that year through to the 2008 season1 — which was cut short for Woods by surgery on the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee — it was Tiger’s approach play and his putting which stood out. He gained 1.6 true strokes per round from the former and 0.8 strokes per round from the latter.
For context, Scheffler — also at 1.6 per round — is the only current player whose Data Golf approach skill rating is above +1; Denny McCarthy is the highest-rated putter at +0.7.
Woods was as good as — or better than — both current leaders in those facets of the game over this period, while also gaining another 0.8 strokes per round off the tee and 0.2 around the green.
In the next phase of his career — between his return from knee surgery in the 2009 season, and treatment for back issues after the 2013 season2 — he maintained extremely high standards in the two strongest parts of his game: he gained 1.4 strokes per round with his approach play, and 0.5 with his putter.
Those back issues recurred between 2014 and 2017, requiring further rounds of surgery — and Woods only played 42 rounds in total during those four PGA Tour seasons.
But upon his return to regular competition after that injury-affected stretch, he regained a lot of his iron-play excellence: between the 2018 and 2020 seasons3, he averaged 0.9 True SG: Approach per round.
Those skills have been severely diminished since his car crash, though: in the 24 rounds Woods has played since the start of 2022, he has lost strokes to the average tour professional with his irons.
Exacerbating this has been the continued decline of his putting: the number of strokes he has gained on the green has fallen with each phase of his career, and over the last few years Tiger has lost about 0.5 strokes to the average pro per round.
How Woods would have aged without the severe physical impact of that accident is a fascinating counterfactual.
It’s likely that golf fans were robbed of at least a few years of solidly above-average play on the PGA Tour — and, at that level, Tiger would have had at least some shot at adding to his tally of Majors.
Data Golf’s analysis of ‘The Skill Distribution of Major Champions4’ finds that:
That’s not an alternate universe that Woods can indulge thoughts of, though; he’s bound by his present circumstances.
And his persistence is remarkable; in that same interview at Augusta a couple of weeks ago, he outlined his near-term plan:
Often, athletes like Tiger just don’t know anything else but the grind.
⚽️ Run the Numbers
In a few hours’ time, I’ll be sitting in the stands at Stamford Bridge watching the second leg of Barcelona Femení’s Champions League semi-final against Chelsea.
Since the final of the 2020-21 edition of the continental competition — which they lost to the Spanish side 4-0 — Emma Hayes’ team have matched up extremely well with Jonatan Giráldez’s.
In each of the last three seasons of UWCL play, Barça have created at least 2.7 non-penalty expected goals per game on average.
Over that same stretch, however, Chelsea have been relatively successful in resisting their overpowering attack. In last year’s semi-final between the two sides, Barça created only 2.1 xG of chances combined across the two legs5 — and, in last week’s first leg, they were held scoreless on 1.1 xG6.
The outcome of last season’s tie basically reflected the underlying balance of play: Barça scored two goals from those 2.1 xG, and conceded once from the 0.9 xG they gave up to Chelsea.
Hayes will be hoping that Barça’s poor finishing continues later today, though7. If it does, she may get one more opportunity to win a European final with Chelsea before she departs the club, like Giráldez, for a job in the United States this summer.
🏉 Watch the Games
The Penrith Panthers — who we covered in this newsletter a couple of months ago — were very close to having the 2023 NRL Grand Final slip out of their grasp.
A lot of that had to do with Brisbane Broncos fullback Reece Walsh, whose try assist in the second half put the Panthers in a 16-point hole.
I don’t think there’s another rugby player in either code right now who is as electric on the ball as Walsh is.
His try against the Canberra Raiders last weekend was exceptional, and displayed many of the attributes that make him so dangerous.
Walsh — standing at third receiver — spots a blown read by the Canberra defence before he’s even caught the ball, and accelerates into that space as soon as his teammate’s pass reaches him.
With another six strides, he’s managed to change lanes — while maintaining his forward momentum — and speed away from the clutches of another pair of Raiders.
One man remains in the backfield, but he can barely lay a hand on Walsh; an early sidestep sends the defender flying by, and the fullback can canter over for the opening try of a convincing Brisbane victory.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published on Saturday May 4th.
Data Golf has 196 ShotLink rounds on record for Woods over this five-year period.
Data Golf has 187 ShotLink rounds on record for Woods over this five-year period.
Data Golf has 116 ShotLink rounds on record for Woods over this three-year period.
Across the 116 men’s Majors since 1995.
Former Chelsea centre back Magdalena Eriksson wrote about their approach to these games in her Guardian column last week: “We changed to a back three and tried to minimise their chances on goal and I think we did it quite well though, in the process, we sacrificed our own attacking game to a degree. In our 1-0 first-leg loss at home, we had an xG of only 0.35.”
— who has written a book about each club in the last few years — analysed the first-leg match-up in his newsletter earlier in the week.
She’ll also be hoping to see plenty of Chelsea fans in the ground; as — who has recently set up on Substack — noted in a piece for The Equalizer this week: “[w]hile Chelsea has long been the dominant force in the WSL, they are yet to host a sellout crowd at Stamford Bridge.”