How important could Super14 home ground advantage be?
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Having dealt with travel and time-zone considerations in his previous Powerade column, renowned Sports Scientist Ross Tucker looks at the influence of home ground advantage in Super Rugby over the past few years – with this weekend’s home semifinals in South Africa in mind.
Incredibly – as Ross point out – not a single team has won a semi-final or final outside its own country since 1999. He takes a look at this remarkable statistic, giving four factors which, as he puts it, “drive home-ground advantage”.
A current member of Paul Treu’s SA Sevens management team, Ross Tucker – in conjunction with Powerade, the official fuel to the Vodacom Super 14 players – tackles yet another pertinent issue in, this, his final Super 14 column of the season.
Home Ground Advantage
As the curtain falls on the 2010 Vodacom Super 14 season, the value of playing home semi-finals and a home final is receiving a great deal of attention. There are, of course, financial benefits to the unions of hosting these crucial matches – but what of the performance, physiology and psychology of home ground advantage?
We know that home-ground advantage is real – analysis of rugby, soccer, baseball, ice-hockey, basketball and football shows this, with home teams winning between 55% and 70% of matches. The absence of home-ground advantage would, over the course of many years, result in a win ratio of exactly 50%. So there is certainly a small advantage, and the more competitive the teams, the more important these small advantages become.
To highlight the difficulty faced by Super 14 teams travelling to other countries for the semi-finals, consider that since 1999, not a single team has won a semi-final or final outside its own country. Yes, not once has a team managed to leave its own country and return a winner; so you see, history is stacked heavily against visiting teams at this stage of the competition! And in the Super 14, the vast travel distances are a big part of the reason, as we looked at in my previous column.
But travel is just part of the equation. There are numerous other reasons why home-ground advantage exists. Some nifty statistical and scientific methods have been used to study this (I’ll spare you the gory stats details!), but the net result is a quirky understanding of why home teams have an advantage.
Generally, there are four factors driving home-ground advantage. Travel is one which we’ve already dealt with. The other three are crowd influence, law interpretations, and familiarity with conditions.
Starting with the law (a favourite of rugby fans everywhere), there is a real perception, true or not, that visiting teams are often ‘robbed’ by referee decisions. And this is not a perception without some merit. Studies have found, for example, that visiting teams in ice-hockey and basketball concede more penalties and have more players sent off for foul play than the home team.
The discrepancy in penalties between visiting and home teams also increases as the crowd increases in size! A big part of this may be the influence of the crowd on the referee. Even the most neutral and professional referee, with no intention of cheating can be swayed by the cheers or boos of a crowd. One study had football referees make judgments based on video footage of obvious foul play, but some refs watched with the sound, while others watched with full sound – including crowd reactions to fouls. It turns out that with the sound, the referee is more likely to be swayed towards what the crowd is calling for! And this is away from the cauldron of pressure of real-time action, where the crowd may have even more influence.
I must point out that there is another possible reason why visiting teams are penalised more. It has been suggested that the hostile environment produces in visiting teams a “victim” or “us against the world” attitude that sees them play more aggressively than they would otherwise. This has, in fact, been documented for visiting teams, and, on occasion, for home teams – depending on the context of the match and the crowd behaviour, which can spur players into negative behaviour just as easily as it can spur them on to performance. Also, the home team is often more aggressive and dominates play, forcing opposition to concede penalties as a result of pressure. So the referee is not always to blame – the players may well deserve to be penalised!
I would suggest, however, that the referee in particular is becoming less and less influential and likely to be swayed by the crowd, because of analysis of the ref’s performance in the full view of the world’s media. Professionalisation of referees – combined with TV coverage – means no place to hide, and so wilful or accidental misinterpreting of rules is progressively being reduced, though of course every fan will feel wronged by referees almost every game, and human error does occur!
The fourth and final factor that produces home ground advantage is familiarity. Familiarity with the playing venue, the weather, the training facilities, and also the people who the player encounters in the week leading up to matches all contribute to improved performance.
How do we know this?
Again, clever statisticians have looked at teams who have moved to a new venue from one season to the next and tracked how they have fared.
It turns out that in 37 sports teams who have moved to a new stadium, their home ground advantage is cut by 25% in the first season at a new home. They are thus less likely to win at home than before. Over time, this advantage returns. Two things are in play here. First, they are no longer as familiar with their own stadium, and as trivial as it may sound, this is a crucial aspect to performance, because it determines routine and focus. The second factor is that the visiting teams no longer have a psychological barrier of entering the ‘fortress’ that may have existed before.
This has implications for the Bulls, of course, who have moved away from their fortress at Loftus for the semi-final and, possibly, the final. Unfamiliar surroundings at Orlando Stadium undermine part of the edge they may normally take into matches. They are a good enough side to overcome this, and will practice at the venue and no doubt do everything possible to make it resemble Loftus (the same sights and sounds), but it would be patronising to dismiss the new venue as completely irrelevant. It may not be decisive to the result, but just ask visiting teams whether they’d rather be at Loftus and you’ll understand the implications!
In my experience, familiarity is the main driver of home ground advantage, and this is why experience is so valuable – experience means more familiarity, less uncertainty, and more collective composure and thus confidence for a team playing in a pressure match. It is this factor, I would suggest, that was crucial in South Africa’s triumph in France in the 2007 World Cup.
Lastly, it’s interesting to look at the South African teams in the Super 14, to ask which teams have the largest home-ground advantage, and which teams travel the best?
Below is a table I have put together showing the average scores of the five SA teams since the Super 14 began. Basically, if you look at the tournament over many years (to cut out error and other variables that affect outcomes), you can work out how much home-ground advantage is worth to a team. For example, if there were no home-ground advantage, then the Bulls would beat Team X by 10 points at Loftus, and would also win by 10 points at Team X’s home ground. However, if playing at home were worth five points, then the win at home would be by 10 points, the win away by five points. Or, the team would lose by five away from home, but manage a draw at home.
Here’s the tale of the tape for SA teams:
The key points are:
• All SA teams fare better at home than away – no surprises here. It is the same for the Australian and New Zealand teams, just as it is in every sport ever analysed – home teams win 60% of matches
• The Bulls and Sharks have the best home records taken purely on results – 79% and 78% win records, respectively. They also perform best away from home.
• The Cheetahs and Lions are the worst performing teams, both home and away. But very importantly, this is more a reflection of the overall quality of the teams than it is of home ground advantage. The acid test comes when you compare home to away records
• Then it turns out that the Lions and Cheetahs, even though they have losing records at home and away, actually benefit more from being at home than other SA teams. That is, they lose narrowly at home, but heavily away, meaning that playing at home, while not enough to spur them to many victories, means relatively more than it does to the Bulls, Sharks or Stormers
• In fact, the Stormers are the best travelling team from SA, relative to how they play in SA. For them, leaving SA results in a shift of just five points, whereas for the Cheetahs and Lions, the swing is 13 and 14 points, respectively.
The bottom line is that quality teams find ways to win enough to overcome disadvantages – in spite of context and circumstances. Home ground advantage counts for a lot, and so a team playing away has a barrier to overcome, but over the course of a long, tough season, where matches are home and away, the quality will emerge.
Ends
*Powerade Preservative Free Sports Drink is only available in ready-to-drink. Coca-Cola, Powerade and the P device are trademarks of The Coca-Cola Company © 2010
• Issued by Powerade, official fuel to the Vodacom Super 14 players.
• • Visuals are courtesy of Gallo Images.
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