Mayo with that?

Who is Perry Mayo and why you should take notice of him?

Down in the centre of France sits Nevers. A city I was once told by a player you’d never live in unless you were being paid to. But each year, they produce players who standout statistically. A few years ago it was Romaric Camou (my Moneyball player), more recently it was Cameroonian Christian Ambadiang, Frenchman Arthur Mathiron, and Fijian Alviereti Loaloa who combined to great one of the great Pro D2 wing pairings and perhaps the best jackling centre in world rugby. This year, it’s the turn of Perry Mayo. Data as always from the excellent Oval Insights.

Mayo is a 23-year-old back three player who is the joint try leader this year in the Pro D2 alongside Samuel Marques of Beziers - both have eight. You would rightly say that being the top try scorer probably precludes you from also flying under the radar. Well, true. But, Mayo has a few statistical quirks which make him even more interesting.

Since 2021, there have been 43 back three players in the Pro D2 who have scored at least eight tries in a season. Before I move on to the next stat, I have to introduce or reintroduce you to Defenders Beaten per Clean Break (DB/CB). A tight five player has a high DB/CB because they have to operate in the high traffic areas where they have a lot of defenders in front of them and need to beat them to get a clean break. Whereas a winger would have a low DB/CB because, especially on a good team, they often get the ball with space in front of them and can get a clean break without beating anyone.

Back to Mayo. Of those 43 back three players who have scored eight or more tries in a season, just three have had a higher DB/CB than Mayo’s 3.2. One of them is Ambadiang who scored nine tries in 2023-24. If we expand that to the Prem, URC, and Top 14 as well then there are 125 players and just nine with a higher DB/CB than Mayo. The average DB/CB for this group is 1.9, meaning Mayo has a score 68% higher than the average.

A higher DB/CB score does not necessarily mean a player is unlucky. A winger who comes off his wing and plays in the middle will have more DBs relative to their CBs and a winger on a weaker team will have fewer CBs and likely fewer DBs as they don’t have the space to operate in - see my previous article on Adam Radwan’s mid-season move from a weaker team to a stronger one.

One way of measuring this is to look at a player’s Expected Tries and compare with their Adjusted Expected Tries.

Expected Tries (xT) - A measure of their Try Equivalents but turned into an easier to understand raw try amount. The 125 players in this list scored a combined 1,314 actual tries and 1,051 Expected Tries. This overshooting is to be expected among outside backs as the Expected Try measurement takes in all players and so includes hookers who score a lot but tend not to carry for a huge amount or beat a lot of defenders.

Adjusted Expected Tries (AxT) - This continues the above measurement but instead of using the players’ actual number of clean breaks it makes a calculation where it assumes the DB/CB is constant.

For Mayo, his xT is 6.3 whereas his AxT is 7.6 and his ‘real’ tries are 8. An AxT of 7.6 is the highest on record for a back three player who has played 600 minutes or less in a season - like Mayo. In addition, it is also the highest for any back three player through the first 11 games of a season.

The king of this metric however is Fijian winger Kaminieli Rasaku, who in a list of 1,942 player seasons, ranks both 1st and 2nd. In 2022-23 while playing for Mont-de-Marsan he scored 13 tries in 19 matches and ranked fourth by tries scored in the league. However, he was doing this with a DB/CB of 6.3 - 2.7x greater than the average. His xT total was 11.6 whereas his AxT total was 18 - the highest on record and the difference of 6.4 is also the highest on record. Last season he did the same while playing for Grenoble where he scored six tries from 9.7 xT but 15.1 AxT (the second highest total).

Conclusion

The raw output of a player is always subject to elements of luck and context. A player might score a lot of tries because his team gives him the ball when all he needs to do is flop over. But, he might just need to flop over because earlier in the attack he beat five defenders and generated a clean break which broke the defensive line and gave him more space. Or he might come off his wing, into a crowded area, and beat more defenders but achieve fewer clean breaks. If you aren’t working to drill into the raw figures in your recruitment then you are missing potential diamonds in the rough. In Mayo’s case, you might think he’s a star just because he scores a lot of tries but actually, he’s even better than that. He is one to watch as he carves out this historic season.

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