Yep, it’s that time of year again. The form of mathematical analysis that we’re probably best known for at The Flag. The commitment that we have to try and operate our summer holidays around.
However, in a change, we’re going to be doing it for the women’s tournament! We tried this way back in WBBL|02, but had to abandon it due to the sheer density of games – but now we’re older, wiser, and more prepared to handle…
For the second week straight, we went two from two, bringing our season tally to 6/16. Better than average!
The two Sunday games both have sides with a 53% chance of scoring a win – Melbourne Victory as they host the Wanderers, Sydney as they travel to Canberra.
We’re experimenting with pushing out our weekly prediction posts earlier in the week, rather than on the day of the event. There will be a retweeted reminder on Friday afternoon, probably. -Ed.
Our most impressive predictive feat of the season came this weekend, by being the only one of the three A-League tipsters to correctly pick a Newcastle victory. Unfortunately, the rest of the week wasn’t as impressive, with our obvious Perth tip the only other correct one.
We improved our accuracy, something which all of the tipsters did. The Flag is still at the bottom of the tree on 32%, with GRAFT sitting at the peak on 40%. However, our Bits decreased, thanks to Melbourne Victory’s upset.
The two Sunday games are the games that we’ve tipped to be the most even for the round. They’re also the only ones in which the tipsters at The Flag go against the grain of the other two.
In the last round, which seems like it happened ages ago, all of us tipsters got two correct – the two games that The Flag disagreed with GRAFT and 538 on were both draws, something none of us are ever going to predict correctly. Both of the other two are sitting on 7/20, better than random chance, while I’m one behind at six.
This round includes our boldest prediction yet, with Sydney FC the heavy favourites against Melbourne Victory. This is the system’s doing, not the author’s.
All three tipsters are in agreement on the Sunday games, but the others have some variation – us being the contrarians in two of them, GRAFT in the other.
We doubled the number of games we tipped correctly last week, with both Saturday games going to the teams we predicted! We’re now at 1/3 for the year, exactly random chance. Our bits decreased though, because we had the odds for the upset wins too low and they counteracted our correct tips.
Whereas we predicted last week to be a good one for the home tips, this week it’s swapped around and the away sides are (for the most part) tipped to win.
Thanks to the excellent Twitter feed @NFL_Scorigami, today we found some awareness of the insane game between the Kansas City Chiefs and Los Angeles Rams. Not only did the game deliver to the hype – both teams were 9-1 heading in – it blew it out of the water, with the third highest-scoring game in NFL history. Even more impressive, it was the first time ever that both teams scored 50+ points in a game.
We saw a good opportunity for some charts, so we made two of them: here’s the quarter-by-quarter score comparison for the five 100+ games in NFL history.
And here’s the score-by-score comparison for the three made in the 21st century (the two earlier games don’t have times for scoring on Football Reference, another excellent site):
In both weeks of the W-League so far, we’ve gotten one game right, so we’re sitting 2/8 at this point. In the last round, the game that we did get was Brisbane’s 1-0 win over Western Sydney. And it looked like we were on track to get a second, until Perth’s insane comeback against Canberra.
We’re tipping a good week for all of the ‘home’ sides (if there’s such a thing in a Melbourne derby), with all of them having a >40% chance of winning by our system.
Despite all of the complicated stuff we like to throw on top of it, cricket is essentially a simple game – whoever scores the most runs wins. Unlike other sports, which have time limits for how much you can score, cricket limits itself in a different way. You only have ten wickets that you can lose, otherwise you’ve got nobody to score the runs for you.
In the shorter forms of the game,1 however, there is a second limit – you only have a certain number of overs to score your runs; fifty in One Day Internationals and twenty in T20s. The batting side, though, still doesn’t want to lose wickets, as that will expose their less successful batsmen.
We used the excellent resource Statsguru to try and get a graphical representation of this. We counted how many men’s ODIs had had the team batting first lose x number of wickets, and what percentage of them led to that team winning, losing, or there being a no-result.
Unsurprisingly, most of the games that had the batting team lose zero or one wickets were rain-interrupted and thus abandoned.
The above graph makes clear that as the number of wickets increases, the chance of the batting team losing increases. It also holds true in men’s T20Is, as well as the women’s equivalents of both:
Note that some of the stats would be skewed by rain-interrupted games – i.e. games that were reduced to 15 overs each would still be counted, even though the batting side may have lost extra wickets in the overs that weren’t played.
1It really is weird that a version of the game that lasts for eight hours is called a short form of it.
Last week was pretty good for us (well, by our standards). We correctly tipped the two Sydney sides and Perth to win, however our tips of Newcastle and (bafflingly) Central Coast came to backfire on us. We’re at 4/5 at this point, one behind GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight. Our ‘bits’ have increased to -1.05.
Our predictions have four games with a clear winner, and one that looks like we’ve hedged our bets perfectly. Newcastle and Sydney both have a 37% predicted chance, but we looked at the data and it has Newcastle slightly edging out the Sky Blues.
That game, and the Wanderers-Brisbane one, are the two where we go against the grain, with GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight both tipping the Wanderers and Sydney. In fact, they’re in agreement on every game.
We did finally get a tip right! We’d named Sydney FC as our likely winners for last Saturday’s Sydney derby, and the Sky Blues did triumph 2-0 in a VAR-affected game.
That mean’s we’ve brought our win percentage up from 0% to 10%.1 However, our ‘bits’ (based around the Monash system) went down by 0.72 points.
Our predictions are less committal then they were last week, with only one team having a majority chance. We hedge our bets on a lot more of the games for Round 3.
In addition, we’ve built a fun new spreadsheet: we’re comparing our predictions to those at GRAFT and FiveThirtyEight. There’s a link to it here, and we’ll put a more permanent one somewhere else, but here’s how we match up for this week:
The Flag 