Wasted Out Wide
Which teams should change their approach to attacking wide?
Should you attack out wide or go through the middle? On paper, you should go wide. Looking at a dataset provided by the excellent Oval Insights of the Prem, Top 14, Pro D2, Champ, and URC 30.3% of all carries are made out wide but they account for 51.1% of all carry metres. Is this going to be the shortest substack ever? Well, no.
The gap between average carry metres and average carry % is 11.8% and that is our benchmark. For example, a team who carries wide 30% of the time but makes 33% of their metres from these wide carries is significantly under-performing. It’s not just good enough to have a higher carry metre % out wide, you need to out-perform 11.8%. So who does?
The top five are listed above and are led by Ulster who out-perform their opportunities by 17.5% (39.6% wide carries and 57.1% metres made from wide carries). Note that we are talking about percentages here, so these teams might still be relatively bad at gaining metres out wide but they are at least better relatively than they are at gaining metres through the middle.
Incidentally, the worst teams are; Vannes (6.1%), Coventry (7.2%), and the Sharks (9.2%). These three should go wide less often and Ulster, Dragons etc should do it more often?
Let’s take three teams; Munster, Toulouse, and the Sharks. Remember that expected gap, 11.8%:
Munster - Wide Carry % = 38.8%, Gap = 16.5%
Toulouse - Wide Carry % = 39.0%, Gap = 13.8%
Sharks - Wide Carry % = 38.9%, Gap = 9.2%
All three teams go wide more or less as often as one another but their outcomes are wildly different. Munster probably should carry wider more often because it is so successful whereas the Sharks don’t get enough joy from their wide carrying. Remember, the average is around 30% so all are above the average anyway. In general, the more you carry wide the better, marginally, you get at it. Marginally, but crucially you don’t become predictable it appears.
This flips when looking at winger carries. As you would expect, wingers carry wide a lot more than teams as a whole; 65% of carries are wide and 72% of metres are made from those wide carries. That means wingers under-perform the 11.8% average we were discussing earlier. This makes sense, there is ultimately a law of diminishing returns.
Every league fails to hit that 11.8% benchmark but there are six teams who surpass it from the 70:
Valence-Romans: +14.2%
Munster: +14%
Northampton: +14%
Perpignan: +13.6%
Bordeaux: +13%
Carcassonne: +11.9%
These teams should consider going wider more often with their wingers, Munster do it just 61% of the time despite getting 75% of their carry metres from it. On the other end of the spectrum, a team like Caldy go wide 75.8% of the time despite only getting 77.8% of total metres from those wide carries. That still means they out-perform based on on the percentages alone but they under-perform our benchmark and should look at how they use their wingers out wide and if it is more beneficial to go through the middle.
So should teams go wide? Well the answer, as hopefully tell, is that it depends and it’s much more interesting than you might initially think. The key is to understand where you rank compared to your rivals and whether you are getting enough mileage from your wide carries. Only then will you know if you are out-performing or not.