redfiona99 | Saints Ahoy - Game 24 and the 2024 season to date

Game 24 of Saint's 2024 season was their Magic Weekend game.

I quite like Wikipedia's description of Magic Weekend - "an annual event organised by the Rugby Football League in which an entire round of Super League matches is played over a weekend at a single stadium to promote the sport of rugby league." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_Weekend)

I've been lucky enough to go twice, both in Newcastle.

The only downside to Magic Weekend is, that in order to sell tickets, Super League tend to have teams play their local rivals. Which means you can end up playing the same team far too often.

And playing Wigan, again, in a year your team are already not doing well, is far, far too often.

When Saints then lose, 20-0, to Wigan, that's the pits - https://www.saintsrlfc.com/2024/08/17/saints-beaten-on-derby-day-at-magic-wknd/

On the other hand the referees let this sort of thing go:

A Saints player in a light blue shirt (it is Matty Lees) is tackled by two Wigan players (in black). The Wigan player on the right is behind the Saints player and has his forearm around the neck of the Saints player. This is an illegal manoeuvre.

Understandably, there can be no diagrams for Saints's point-scoring moments in this game, nor are their any updates to their point scoring moments for the season.

There is no pattern to when Saints conceded, except maybe a slight suggestion that they concede more in the last 10 minutes (but so does everyone else).

Bar chart of when Saints concede up to game 24. It looks like a row of skyscrapers. The highest point is minute 76 which features 6 point conceding moments. There are 3 minutes with 5 point-conceding moments, minutes 11, 32 and 80. See what I mean by no pattern.

The "who is present when Saints concede" diagram is so weird that it made me double check that I'd not made some sort of data entry error.

Bar chart of who is on the field when Saints concede. The bar for Waqa Blake is much longer than that of anyone else, up past 100 when the next nearest (Welsby and Lomax) are at around 80.

It makes sense, just, if you consider that he's about the only player who didn't have an extended injury / suspension break.

It does make the "Who is present when Saints concede" matrix look intriguingly different.

Matrix of who is present when Saints concede up to the end of game 24. There is a very dark red line about 2/3rds of the way up and left that is the line for Blake. He is completely separated from the next darkest chunk of 12 players in the bottom right hand corner (Welsby, Clark, Sironen, Mbye, Lees, Whitley, Delaney, Dodd, Lomax, Bell, Percival and Makinson). Between them is a chunk of slightly paler interchanging forwards and Bennison (Hurrell, Matautia, Bennison, Knowles, Batchelor). Above the line of Blake are the players who played less often. They too are in two chunks. The first slightly darker yellow chunk are next to the line of Blake. They are Ritson, Davies, Robertson. The palest section is Walmsley, Burns, Wingfield, Royle, Paasi, Stephens and Vaughan.

The equivalent network graph is shaped like a fox's face.

Network graph of who is present when Saints concede. It is shaped like the face of a fox. The central blob of most commonly present players would be the area around the face and cheeks. Burns on his own forms the pointy chin. Royle is on his own in the left ear. Walmsley is half way up the right ear and Wingfield is its tip. This tells me that the other less frequently playing together players have now been eaten up by the central blob.

As Royle, Walmsley, Wingfield and Burns are the only players sticking out, it tells me that the other players who had previously been in the little "rarely but when they do they play together" sticking out blobs have now been subsumed into the central blob. This is true, as they are now at the edges of the central blob (Paasi, Vaughan and Stephens on the left hand side and Bennison, Knowles and Batchelor on the right).

That change is most interesting, and suggests Saints have had to start leaning on the full squad of players.