Alex Sanderson oversaw one of Prem’s biggest squad turnovers this summer, with 12 new players arriving at Sale.<\/p>\n
“When you have got a raft of possible players, stats are always a big factor to help understand which of them fit your game model,” he says.<\/p>\n
“We know how many metres we make post contact, what our defence depends on, and what attacking decisions we make and you can map those metrics.<\/p>\n
“You can create a spider graph to find players that fit the ‘shape’ that you want for a particular position.”<\/p>\n
Courtney Lawes was Sale’s headline signing. The numbers he was registering in ProD2 with Brive, helped convince Sanderson that the former England captain was worth a one-year deal.<\/p>\n
In a similar way, stats also helped Phil Dowson, Sanderson’s counterpart at Northampton, work out how to replace Lawes when he left Saints in 2024.<\/p>\n
“We also have a game model around what we want different positions to look like,” he said.<\/p>\n
“If you can’t get everything you need in a position, at a price point you can afford, you have to make amends elsewhere.<\/p>\n
“So to replace Courtney Lawes, we needed some line-out ability, some turnover ability, some ball-carrying and also some leadership.<\/p>\n
“The game is now being coded in so much more depth than previously and the challenge is to use that to separate the wheat from the chaff.<\/p>\n
“We try and find people who fit the bill, trim the list depending on what we can afford and then do due diligence by looking more deeply at their performances.”<\/p>\n
The edge for clubs now is no longer the data itself, but the ability to identify what is most important amongst it all.<\/p>\n
Oval has developed a model which flags up players who have outperformed its expectations in different aspects of the game.<\/p>\n
But clubs are also looking externally for expertise.<\/p>\n
Sale are bringing on board an artificial intelligence company, recently bought by billionaire owner Simon Orange.<\/p>\n
It will initially crunch numbers on injury prevention and player availability, but Sanderson plans to add recruitment to its tasklist.<\/p>\n
Northampton have had help from the world of Formula 1.<\/p>\n
Ayao Komatsu, the Haas team principal, was a rugby player and is still a rugby fan. The 50-year-old turned out for Old Wheatleyans and Loughborough when he moved from his native Japan to study in the Midlands in the 1990s.<\/p>\n
He has come into Northampton to talk over his approach to data with Dowson.<\/p>\n
“For Ayao, the most important thing is the driver,” says Dowson. “How does he feel? For Haas, the driver’s backside is the best receptor of data.<\/p>\n
“Even in a sport like F1, which is so data driven, he is still going to the human element of it. That is something that resonates with me.”<\/p>\n
Sanderson also emphasises that while data can sift and shortlist possibilities, there is a human touch to recruitment.<\/p>\n
A coach’s eye can pick up on details around a carry or clearout which might be missed by a blunt database definition.<\/p>\n
Just as importantly, in a sport in which success often hinges on cohesion and unity, any new arrival needs to fit in as a person, as well as a player.<\/p>\n
“That data dive and performance analysis will only get them to the door, really,” says Sanderson.<\/p>\n
“Then it’s all about character. It has to be about character, because there’s quite a lot of players that consistently look quite good, but won’t be the right fit for the group.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alex Sanderson oversaw one of Prem’s biggest squad turnovers this summer, with 12 new players arriving at Sale.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":937257,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[567],"tags":[64,63,760,85],"class_list":["post-937256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-rugby","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-rugby","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937256","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=937256"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/937256\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/937257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=937256"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=937256"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=937256"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}