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| The lottery of NRL tipping. |
How does
‘Rhonda’ from reception or ‘Tim’ from the IT department come out on top despite
having little to virtually no interest in the sport, when passionate and
engaged sports fans who put hours of ‘research’ into their selections for the
first week of the tipping comp fall to the bottom.
The old-fashioned
statement of “couldn’t win a chook raffle” couldn’t apply more. That is, that
despite how easy it seems to pick the winners, you get shafted by teams who you
thought would be looking like receiving the finely-shaped piece of pine that
your mum used to whack you on the ass after you called your sister a ‘so and
so’ as a kid.
You see the
tipsters, like Rhonda and Tim, will use a variety of subjective reasons to pick
their teams. They won’t look at results, they won’t check to see who is out
injured; heck they won’t even know who is playing. They will make their
selections based purely on their thoughts of a team at the time. They’ll
consider the colours of the teams playing and whether they resonate as their
favourite coloured dress, they’ll decide that a dragon is far more capable of
eating an eel, than an eel is of a eating a dragon. They’ll take their dad’s
team, regardless of how their dad’s team is running, or who they are playing.
Their
care-free attitude to the competition and vein interest in the sport is the
reason they go so swell, because unwittingly and unbeknown to them, each week
they are taking risks on certain teams to win. They will take the Titans to
beat the Warriors in New Zealand, despite the Warriors having won 5 in a row
and the Titans missing several key players. They make the picks that pupils of
the great game aren’t able to make, because of the risk involved.
The
committed and knowledgeable tipster, will pour through newspapers all week
running their eyes over the endless print searching for that one little bit of
information that will provide them with ‘the edge’. When they find it, they
think they are armed with something their rival tipsters won’t have, inside
information. They scour the footy shows leading into Friday, they sus out their
rivals selections, they chat with colleagues to see if anyone saw the news
story last night that let them know that Paul Gallen is out for the weekend after
a visit to the judiciary, they will wait until the last minute on a Friday to
put their tips in, in the hope they hear on the radio heading home that Matt
Cooper has once again been ruled out with a calf strain.
In reality,
it’s a 50/50 split decision. You’d be better off flipping a coin.
An analysis
of the round one from the last five years of the NRL competition reveals some
of the reasons to a poor start to a tipping comp.
·
16
out of 40 games were upsets (40%)
·
21
out of 40 games were won by teams that missed the finals the year before
(52.5%)
You can see
that a large proportion of games were upsets in round one. It can also be seen that
form, from the previous season, means nothing, with over half the games won by
teams who didn’t make the finals. Furthermore, quite often odds of round one
teams’ predicts there will be a large score line with the favourite winning. Over
the last five years, 52.5% of games were won by less than 10 points, showing
close contests across round one each year.
So after a
bad start to the year’s tipping comp, you might‘ve thought you could make it up
in round two. Well, if this year’s round two games are anything to go by, you
were kidding yourself. Four of the teams that lost in round one, won their
games in round two. Once again, four of the teams that won in round two,
finished in the bottom half of the table in 2014.
The reality
is the NRL is one of the closest competitions in the world. There are more
upsets in the NRL than any other competition around the world. That is what
keeps the game so interesting to the fans, the fact that on any given day, any
team could beat the other. So much like the tipsters that pick on colour,
mascot or anything else, you should just flip a coin when putting your tips in
for the first few rounds of the competition.
As 1986 Parramatta
Eels premiership winner Tony Chalmers put it to me the other night, “Never have
a bet on round one or two, they work themselves out after a few rounds, but
round one and two are a nightmare to pick a winner”.
Too true
Tony. After round three, teams begin to find form and the cream of the crop can
be separated from those who will actually look like receiving that
finely-shaped piece of pine they call the wooden-spoon.
Good luck in
round three, tipsters.