🏉 The Springboks have won consecutive World Cups. How scared should Ireland be?
🏉 The Springboks have won consecutive World Cups. How scared should Ireland be?
My Week in Sport(s): men's test rugby, Shafali Verma in form and Shohei Ohtani
Welcome to My Week in Sport(s) — a regular newsletter from Plot the Ball.
In this edition:
🏉 South Africa and ‘sequencing luck’
🏏 Shafali Verma, combining speed with control
⚾️ Shohei Ohtani’s hitting patterns
🏉 The Springboks have won consecutive World Cups. How scared should Ireland be?
Almost every North American sports fan will likely be familiar with the phrase ‘flags fly forever’.
It’s less common around the rest of the world — but I often find it coming to mind when I think of the South African men’s rugby team.
At the 2019 World Cup, they became the first nation to win the Webb Ellis Cup after losing a match in the group stages. They then repeated this feat in 2023 — and, for good measure, won their three knockout games by a combined margin of three points.
No one can ever take the Springboks’ successive World Cups away from them.
But they have undoubtedly benefitted from ‘sequencing luck’ — or, “having your [scoring] for and against come at convenient moments” — along the way.
In any analytically-driven discussion of North American sports, the idea that the results of close games are fairly random is pretty well embedded.
And I think it’s something that international rugby fans would do well to remember, too — especially as the most impressive men’s team of the last four years begin a two-test series against the Springboks in Pretoria later today.
Despite the fact that they faltered at the quarter-final stage of last year’s World Cup, making that judgement of Ireland shouldn’t be controversial.
When you aggregate the results of each men’s international team against their ‘Tier 1’ opponents between the end of the 2019 and 2023 World Cups, it’s clear that South Africa were a good team1.
Ireland, though, were materially better.
They won 77% of their matches against top opponents over this four-year period, scoring 63% of the total points in those games2. Both marks were the highest among Tier 1 nations.
And this was basically borne out when the two teams met in the group stage of the 2023 World Cup; on neutral territory, Ireland won a closely contested game by 13 points to 8.
Despite that loss, South Africa proceeded to squeak through three successive knockout games — winning each by a single point.
And perhaps the most obvious example of the Springboks’ ‘sequencing luck’ came in the final, against the opponent who had sent Ireland home.
With just over five minutes remaining in the match, New Zealand had a chance to take a 14-12 lead. Goal-kicker Jordie Barrett missed a difficult penalty attempt, though — and South Africa stayed just in front because of a sequence which neither their players nor coaches had any control over3.
From the Springboks’ perspective, this was nothing more than an opponent not executing as well as they might well have at a ‘convenient moment’.
Not taking the results of knockout tournaments as gospel is something that I’ve continually mentioned in this newsletter, and so you probably won’t be surprised that I’m applying that standard to South Africa too.
What should all of this mean for our expectations over the next couple of weekends, though?
While I’m pretty confident in saying that Ireland have been the better of the two rugby teams over the last four years, I’m considerably less confident that they will come out on top in this two-match series.
The most obvious thing to weight against the visitors is the fact that they will have to play these games away from home.
Taking South Africa’s historical home-and-away record against New Zealand — their most frequent opponent — as a guide suggests that home advantage4 is worth about a seven-point swing on the scoreboard in favour of the Springboks.
In New Zealand, their average scoring margin against the All Blacks is an 8.4-point deficit; on home soil, this deficit falls to 1.3 points.
The team that South Africa will put on the field in this series is also much closer to their ‘peak’ side from the last World Cup cycle than Ireland’s is — and there’s an easy way to visualise this.
By taking each starting XV for today’s first test and calculating the proportion of games the players in each position started for their team against Tier 1 opponents between the last two World Cups, you can see that South Africa have a much more even spread of recent experience in their side than Ireland do.
The 15 players in Ireland’s line-up made 44% of possible starts in aggregate over the last cycle, and five players made two or fewer.
South Africa’s XV, in contrast, made 57% of the available starts during this period — with every player named today having started at least a quarter of the Springboks’ Tier 1 games between their two World Cup wins.
Cohesion between teammates is crucial in defence-focused invasion sports like rugby, as we explored earlier this year — and Ireland, who tend to draw heavily on the playing talent of their most successful domestic team, have long been a paradigmatic example of this.
But there’s now reason to believe that South Africa might match them in this regard.
Ireland’s newer faces have had a Six Nations campaign to get to grips with international rugby; second row Joe McCarthy, fly-half Jack Crowley and right wing Calvin Nash each started all five of their games earlier in the year.
But that tournament didn’t go quite as well as it could have for them, despite finishing top of the table.
They had an average scoring margin of +16.8 points per game across their five games in 2024; against the same slate of fixtures in 20225, they had an average margin of +21 points.
If we started this year of international rugby thinking that Ireland were a markedly better team than South Africa, then, there’s probably enough in the data above to make us reconsider.
Given the Springboks’ apparent cohesion advantage and the fact that they’re playing these games at home, I would probably put the two sides on an even footing.
This is even more reason not to read too much into the outcome of this series if the games are close, though.
If you’re an Ireland fan or a South Africa fan, a series victory would be something to be immensely proud of. Just don’t mistake the fortunate sequencing of bounces for skill; top-level sport is a lot more contingent than we like to think.
🏏 Run the Numbers
Elite women’s cricketers get far fewer opportunities to play test matches than their peers in the men’s game do, with the balance of international scheduling tilted much further towards white-ball cricket — and away from the longer red-ball game6.
This makes it more difficult than it should be to contextualise Shafali Verma’s eye-opening performance for India against South Africa last week, where she scored 205 off 197 balls in her team’s first innings.
It is one of 11 individual scores of 100 or more in tests since 2022 — and the only one to have been completed at a scoring rate of better than one run per ball faced.
Verma’s opening partner, Smriti Mandhana, actually came close to hitting that mark in Chennai as well. Her knock of 149 from 161 balls was good for a strike rate of 93 runs per 100, which ranks second among those 11 centuries; the median strike rate in those innings was just 64.
Verma was also able to score that quickly without incurring too much risk. ESPNCricinfo recorded her control percentage in India’s first innings as 91% — meaning she played a false shot (with the ball not going where she intended) to only 9% of the balls she faced.
In fact, each of the three fastest test hundreds over this period have come at a control percentage of above 90% — and all have come against South Africa7.
Their bowlers have struggled to create wicket-taking chances against top test batting line-ups, then. But it’s hard not to empathise with them, given that — unlike their Indian opponents — they don’t even have the chance to play red-ball cricket at domestic level.
⚾️ Watch the Games
Shohei Ohtani isn’t going to be competing in the Home Run Derby at Major League Baseball’s All-Star game later this month — but he’s produced enough highlights at the plate so far this season as it is.
While taking a year off from pitching to allow his right elbow time to recover from surgery, he’s already hit 27 home runs for the Los Angeles Dodgers8.
According to the league’s Statcast data, he has both the hardest hit batted ball (by exit velocity) by any hitter so far in 2024 — as well as the longest recorded home run.
From this data, we can also see that the distribution of Ohtani’s home runs across the field so far this year has been pretty striking.
According to Statcast’s spray charts, he tends to keep his hands closer to his body when opponents throw fastballs — and hits a lot of home runs straight back over the pitcher’s head.
When he sees a breaking ball he likes the look of, though, he’s not afraid to take a massive cut and try to pull it over the right-field fence. This can sometimes result in ungainly swings — but, when he connects, it’s game over.
Justin Martinez of the Arizona Diamondbacks suffered that fate on Tuesday evening.
With Arizona ahead in the bottom of the seventh inning, Martinez left a 90mph slider up in the zone. Ohtani swiftly deposited the pitch into the Dodger Stadium bleachers, restoring the home team to a 4-3 lead.
You can watch a clip of this sequence here.
The next edition of My Week in Sport(s) will be published in two weeks, on Saturday July 20th.
South Africa’s winning percentage over this period was 67%, and they scored 59% of the points in their games.
I’ve not calculated an exponent specifically for men’s rugby, but Ireland’s record also gives them the best Pythagorean winning percentage of any team using the rough formula of ‘(points scored ^ 2) / ((points scored ^ 2) + (points allowed ^ 2))’.
In contrast, Barrett knocked over a (significantly easier) attempt late in the quarter-final against Ireland to take his team 28-24 ahead; this meant that Ireland had to try and score a try in the match’s dramatic final stages, rather than settling for a penalty or a drop goal.)
The first test will also be played at altitude in Pretoria — another factor which tends to lead to exaggerated home advantage.
Fixtures in the Six Nations alternate between home and away each year, so it makes more sense to compare even years with other even years than to compare consecutive years; in 2022 and 2024, for instance, Ireland played both France and England — traditionally the two strongest nations — away from home.
There have been 94 men’s test matches completed since the start of 2022, compared to 407 men’s one-day internationals. Over the same period, there have been only seven women’s tests, compared to 164 women’s ODIs.
Annabel Sutherland’s score of 210 in February was the third fastest at a strike rate of 82, and came at a control percentage of 92%; Mandhana’s 149 last week came at a control percentage of 95%.
All statistics are as at the end of their game on Wednesday night.