Thursday 23 April 2015 09:48, UK
Sky Sports' Phil Clarke takes a look at the stats and asks how heavily each team relies on their goal kicker.
It looks like King Kevin may no longer be the ‘main man’ at Leeds and Brian McDermott has a great dilemma. Even a man with over 4000 career points isn’t guaranteed of a place in the Leeds starting line-up.
At 34 years of age, Kevin Sinfield can’t compete with his younger rivals when it comes to running with the ball and, unlike the Ryder Cup in golf, the captain in a rugby league team needs to play a full and active part in the matches. Some people have said to me that they’d still select Sinfield for a big game because of his kicking. Well, it’s quite hard to measure the timing, accuracy and effectiveness of his field kicks - those that gain ground for the team and put their opponents under pressure.
Leeds have been excellent at this in lots of big games over the last decade but that’s not to say that somebody can’t do it. What about the importance of goal kicking? I thought that I’d check the Opta stats to look at their goal kicking records this season and compare Liam Sutcliffe to Sinfield.
So far this year, Sinfield has successfully converted 38 of 44 goals, which is an 86 per cent success rate, and has the best record of all the main kickers. He is the only one with a success rate above 80 per cent and sets the benchmark for all the rest in rugby league.
The man most likely to take his crown has attempted about half as many but sits well below him in terms of accuracy. Sutcliffe’s record so far is 14 from 21 or roughly 67%. We’ve not looked at exactly where every kick has been taken from, or the conditions in the match, so it’s not a direct comparison but it gives an indication of the difference between the two at present.
However, the question of how important goal kicking is in the 13-man game is one that fascinates me.
It’s interesting to see that the second most accurate goal kicker plays for the team sitting second in the table. Although that’s where the correlation ends. Wigan lie third with a goal kicker that has been less successful than the rest.
Widnes fans might take note of the fact that up until their victory over Castleford, Jack Owens had only kicked 11 from 18 attempts. I’m not sure if he’ll move above Tickle, White and Marsh now as their first-choice kicker - Tickle has a 75% success rate in the seven games he’s played.
I think that we have undervalued the significance of goal kicking for a very long time in rugby league and ultimately I think that it’s tries you need to score to win a match and competition, but in this age of ‘marginal’ gains, perhaps it’s getting more important than ever before.
