Match analysis in Rugby Union: performance indicators of Rugby Championship and Super Rugby teams

Performance Analysis in Rugby Union: a Critical Systematic Review

“…Critical information [44]. For instance, a major confounding factor is the opposition team yet only eight of the articles retrieved considered the opposing team in the analysis [10,11,14,15,28,32,33,40]. More than half of the articles investigated successful and unsuccessful measures of performance by quantifying performance indicators over entire competitions.…”

“…Clean breaks (relative) Professional domestic Bennett et al [41] Average carry metres (relative) Professional domestic Bennett et al [41] (-): less than unsuccessful teams; "Gain line +": crossing the opposition gain line; "Gain line +P": not defined by the authors; AggPI: aggression performance indicator (tackle wins + ball carries and dominant + clear-out: effective) + (contacts/2) Applying the outcome from research using simple, descriptive and isolated variables without consideration of confounding variables is problematic in tactical preparation. For example, set piece tries discriminated between successful and unsuccessful teams [28]; however, without contextual information such as score differential, weather conditions, pitch location or team ranking, little inference can be made regarding how or why behaviours occurred. One study [14] investigating defending strategies in tackle contact events which considered the playing situation, defensive characteristics and phase outcomes bore some insights into effective defensive processes such as defensive speed, field location and period within a match.…”

“…Furthermore, of the 22 articles, only 16 were explicit about the process of selecting the indicators used. The selection process included expert opinion and research group [1,17,21], commonly available statistics by a third-party company [22,23,25,28,38] and those selected solely by the research group [3,18,29,39] (Table 3). The method used when selecting performance indicators in the remaining articles was undisclosed.…”

The relationship between physical characteristics and match collision performance among elite international female rugby union players

“…In rugby union, the outcome of a match can be partly determined by selected on‐field technical and tactical actions, collectively referred to as “performance indicators’ (PIs) (Hughes et al, 2017). For example, the effective performance of actions involving collisions have been consistently associated with match outcome, with tackle success rate, metres carried, number of defenders beaten, clean breaks and turnovers on opposition ball are also related to successful performance (Bennett et al, 2019; Gaviglio et al, 2014; Hughes et al, 2017; Ortega et al, 2009; Sella et al, 2019). However, it is important to recognise that individual on‐field collision actions of rugby players contribute to successful performance in different ways, with some PIs characterised by their high frequency, defined as “effort” variables, whilst others are dependent on successful outcome, defined as “performance” variables (Cunningham et al, 2018).…”

“…Unsurprisingly, this momentum is positively related to collision wins and the number of offloads in elite‐level male rugby union players (Cunningham et al, 2018). It is therefore well established, that physical characteristics in male rugby are critical to the outcome of contact and collision events (Cunningham et al, 2018; Redman et al, 2022; Smart et al, 2013; Speranza et al, 2015), which may subsequently have a bearing on winning or losing matches (Bennett et al, 2019; Sella et al, 2019). This information highlights that training programs designed for elite rugby players should develop physical characteristics that are associated with effective performance of specific collision actions.…”