Boom and Bust

Are wingers who boom better than those who are consistently fine?

This season there have been 160 Prem games started by wingers. Those have resulted in 424.5 Try Equivalents (TEs) being achieved by those players. An average of 2.7 TEs per match as per Oval Insights data. Except, 44% of matches featured a winger breaking that 2.7 mark, which means 56% failed to hit the average mark. We can call those ‘bust’ performances, a ‘boom’ performance would be one which goes over that mark.

Here we can see each of the players who have played at least four games this season alongside their Boom % (games they’ve beaten the average TE total) and BIG Boom % (games they’ve beaten five TEs). First of all, a shoutout to Edoardo Todaro who hits the average two thirds of the time and has had breakout performances in three games so far - he has two of the top ten best TE totals this season.

We can see the top four by total TEs here - Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, Todaro, Henry Arundell, and Kalaveti Ravouvou. We can see how rarely these players drop below the golden average line (red) and when they do how infrequently they have really anonymous matches.

If we narrow this down to just Feyi-Waboso, we can see he has slowed down in three of the last four matches; against Sale, Saracens, and Leicester. However, he started the season with three matches well above expectations. Which brings us on to the key question, would you rather someone like Feyi-Waboso who reaches the rarest highs but is sometimes below average or someone like Ravouvou who rarely underperforms but also rarely stitches together outrageous results?

We can split our performances up into four categories:

<1 - An anonymous appearance

>1 - 2.64 - A below average appearance

>2.65 - 4.99 - An above average performance

>5 - A truly exceptional performance

What is interesting is we can see that those anonymous performances rarely turn into wins. Avoid the appearance where the commentators barely say your name and even if you don’t get over the average TE total your team will still win around 50% of the time. Ultimately, this just tells you that the better your wingers play the more likely you are to win and given that wing performance is heavily influenced by whole team performance, that isn’t a hugely revealing. However, what it does tell us is a consistently just above average winger is of more value than someone who reaches the same season TE total but via amazing performances interspersed with totally anonymous ones.

This is also a question in cricket, is it better to have someone who plays to their average (i.e. average is 38 and each innings they score 38) or better to have someone who scores a ton and then in between scratches around for a five. This takes us into the realm of try value, which we won’t go into in much detail here, but essentially not all tries are the same. Noah Caluori had the best single game performance in three years last October with 14 TEs against Sale Sharks. That was a match they won 65-14. Ollie Sleightholme had the sixth best with 8.6 TEs when the Saints beat Gloucester 90-0 in May 2024. Now, if rugby actually worked like this, you’d ideally want Caluori and Sleightholme to share out some of those TEs on matches where they undershot the average. That is because the line break or defender beaten or indeed try at 80-0 is not worth all that much whereas when three points down it’s the difference between one league point and at least four league points.

What do you reckon?