6 Nations 2021 Data Visualisation Project - England

Team: England 

Number of point scoring occasions: 32 ( It's deliberately phrased as number of point scoring occasions as, in this, a try, a conversion and penalties each count as one.)

Number of players present for at least 1: 27 

Who scored the points?

 

Despite how heavily tilted that is to Owen Farrell, it's about what you'd expect, because, even without penalties, the person assigned kicking duties (normally the fly half), Owen Farrell in England's case, gets a chance to score after each try. So you expect them to have roughly as many point-scoring occasions as everyone else added together. 

When were the points scored? Here we have literally the only problem I've found, I can't convince the code to put points scored in minutes 0-9 ahead of the number 10. It's less of a problem with England, because there was only one points-scoring occasion before 10 minutes, but it's definitely a problem for Wales's data.

   

Who scored when? The diagrams highlight the Farrell domination.  

This is the % version of the same diagram -  

I think the not-percentage version is clearer. 

Who was present for more than one point scoring opportunity?

 

For England, Tom Curry, Maro Itoje, Jonny May and Anthony Watson were present for all the point scoring moments. 

This next diagram nicely shows which players tended to get subbed off due to the position they played  

I'll get back to this in the final, future work section of the summary post, but I'd be really interested to see how this looks for something like rugby league where you have rolling substitutions (or, indeed ice hockey). 

Who was on the pitch at the same time when points were scored? 

 Dendrogram

   

 Heatmap 

 

You can clearly see the Curry, Itoje, May and Watson cluster, but I am intrigued by the Genge, Stuart, Robson, Lawrence, Earl, George mini-cluster at the top of the diagram. I wonder if they're the ones that get subbed on to finish games. 

Matrix of co-occuring players  

The mini-cluster are also present in the matrix diagram, separate to the main cluster of players frequently on the pitch when England scored. There's a central 11 (Vunipola B, Curry, Itoje, Slade, Watson, Youngs B, May, Daly, Sinckler, Ford and Farrell), who also correspond with what I'd consider as Eddie Jones's core team from last year.

Six Nation 2021 Visualisation of was on the pitch when the teams scored - Introduction

Partly in follow up to some ideas from my 2019 Rugby Union data visualisations and partly in advance of next year's StatsCup, because I have grand plans, I wanted to find a way of mapping players on a team that play together as a unit. 

This is somewhat complicated by my complete lack of coding. 

More recently, I read this marvellous post by Jim Vallandingham.  I really like this post because it gives code and a link to his data so I can figure out the format my data needs to be in in order to replicate the analysis. If more people could do that, I'd be grateful. 

If you read the post, you'll see it contains a way of looking at actors who co-occur. And I thought, ding, ding, I can warp and spindle this to fulfill my aims. 

I have chosen to look at which players appear together when their team score a try and the time of the tries to see if I can spot any patterns. 

The data sources used are: 

The Guardian As It Happened reports - https://www.theguardian.com/sport/six-nations-2021 Wikipedia's 6 Nations 2021 article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Six_Nations_Championship 

I've had to use both because it turns out that the Guardian As It Happened reports don't always cover substitutions, and I've used the Wikipedia page to fill in the gaps. Occasionally, they disagree as to the exact minute of substitutions and points scored. 

You might have noticed this is being posted quite close to the start of this year's Six Nations, and if you've guessed that's because I forgot the start date for the 2022 Six Nations, you'd be right. I thought it began at the start of March and I planned to post these posts in the two weeks that lead up to the start date. The plan has undergone a sudden change :)

The plan is to present the information for each team  (in alphabetical order to avoid argument), and then a post comparing the different teams. 

I will be trying to upload the code and the json files onto github because I'm sure other people will do even more fun things with the data, but the word "trying" is the important one in that sentence. 

I need to thank @jenineharris, @z_4_ch and @robchristley for answering my questions on Twitter when I was struggling. 

The first things I learnt doing this are: 

1- I need to update R and RStudio more regularly than once a year 

2 - library (package = "name") is my friend 

3 - capital letters are important in R 

4 - how to set up a Github repository.

England - https://fulltimesportsfan.blogspot.com/2022/01/6-nations-2021-data-visualisation.html

John Wick: Parabellum nearly got me punched in the face

There is a scary gif later on. I promise you it is vital for the story. 

I had missed the first John Wick film for some unknown reason, probably fencing. And the second came out during what we will refer to as the unfortunate Newcastle time. 

So I hadn't seen either John Wick film. This surprised L, who thought it would be precisely the sort of violent baroque nonsense that would appeal to me. 

I suspected it would be, certainly Chad Stahelski and Jonathan Eusebio (and Jon Valera) is a combo that creates fight scene joy, and I was going to go along anyhow. 

However, apparently, I didn't look suitably enthused so L played his trump card - Mark Dacascos. Now L knew I was a big fan of Mark Dacascos, and he correctly suspected that I hadn't heard he was going to be in John Wick 3. 

Unfortunately, L had somewhat underestimated my reaction. Imagine you are happily sitting on a sofa, telling your friend something you think will make her happy and you get this reaction (this was his actual description of events):

 

via GIPHY

You too would nearly swing for the person golluming at you. 

In my defence, I was surprised, it's an actor who I really like in action film that had the promise of being glorious baroque violent nonsense and I am an enthusiastic person. 

Somehow, I avoided getting punched. 

The film itself was enjoyable nonsense. It's very much an excuse of a plot used to string together a series of cool fight scenes and some cool character bits. But it's best not to think about the plot too much, or indeed at all, because it makes no sense if you spend more than 3 seconds thinking about it. For instance, the entire Halle Berry bit, nothing but an exceptionally fine piece of nonsense diversion (with remarkably immortal dogs). On the other hand, it does cause Said Tamaghouni to appear on my screen so I shan't complain too much (why, oh why, is he not in all the things?) 

The whole thing was stuffed with solid actors (to the point where every second scene caused a moment of "oh, it's thingy") and let them get on with it. It turns out, if you give good actors space to do their thing, they will add to what would otherwise be a very flat story. 

Other things that helped with that is the set design and cinematography. This world is believable as a shadowy underworld running alongside our own, with its own ridiculous rules, and dark and miserable and rainy, and light merely deepening the shadows. 

 I loved so much of it; 

the King of the Bowery (and yes, I plan on making the pigeon speech into a cross-stitch sampler), 

Ian McShane doing charming and sinister as he does so well (Ian McShane makes everything better),

Lance Reddick,

the Adjudicator and the sheer power and lack of fear (the Pax Romana lives),

unexpected Yayan Ruhian,

watching a film that understood how much I wanted to see several of these actors in anything ...

And Mark Dacascos being sinister and odd and weird even for an assassin and just ... 

I was filled with glee pretty much throughout. It's a spun sugar web of nothing but style that seems to have been made for me. 

That is where my review ends, the rest is spoilery comments about the ending - because yeah, no way was Winston aiming to kill John Wick. If Winston wanted him dead, he would have been dead. And I think the Adjudicator knows it. I think Winston is using him as part of a power grab against the High Table, but then we're back with the important statement - Ian McShane makes everything better and I want him to lurk sinisterly and avoiding Wickian vengeance for at least two more films.

Exhibition review - Leonardo da Vinci: A Life in Drawing

The exhibition ran from May to October 2019, and you can find the exhibition blurb here. (I recommend the website, it’s very in-depth.) 

I want to start by saying we didn’t arrive late: we were exactly on time to be there with 5-10 minutes to spare. What we didn’t take into account (because we didn’t know it was happening), was that the course for the Virgin London 10 K would prevent us from crossing from Green Park to Buckingham Palace. 

[Cue a 15 minute dash around Buckingham Palace to get to the exhibition in time.] 

Mostly, other than a sore ankle (the sloth is my heraldic device for a reason), my take-away from this was how tiny Buckingham Place is (relatively). 

Not so much the building itself, Schönbrunn is probably no bigger, but the grounds. I can’t think of another palace where you could circle round the whole thing, gardens and all, in less than 15 minutes, at a fast walking pace. 

So, after that, the security checks and your brave protagonist finding out that they'd got their top on back-to-front, we arrived at the exhibition. 

Now I’d seen some of the highlights while I was in Newcastle, and I have to say, I think the layout of the Newcastle exhibition was easier to follow. They made a virtue of having less, and focussed on da Vinci’s techniques and materials, and how he used them to create the effects he was aiming for. 

The Buckingham Palace exhibition didn’t seem to know whether it wanted to be organised chronologically, or thematically; and went with a mixture of the two, a mostly chronological layout with blobs of theme, which didn’t quite work. 

You’d be reading along going “okay, this followed that, because he fell out with yet another patron” when suddenly there’d be some work from 10 years and two patrons before. I think a thematic layout would have worked better. 

The works themselves were exceptional - the detail, and the way the drawings and sketches demonstrate the work that went into the greatness of his larger works and his plans for works that didn’t quite come off (the bronze horse for instance, sadly I can’t find a link to the studies for the engineering required for something that idiotically big). 

My favourite pieces were either the maps, the plants or the cat sketches. 

After that, a trip to Brazilian barbeque, to finish off an excellent day.

Set of Six - Which six films would I pick for a Marvel film marathon to lead into Endgame

A cinema near L does theme days, where they show all of a set of films one after the other e.g. all the LOTR films or a selection of Schwarzenegger. There was talk of them doing an MCU-athon running into the first showing of Endgame. 

So L set me a task - having watched Avengers: Endgame, which Marvel films would you choose to lead into it? 

I'm only allowed to pick 7 films, because that is the maximum they can show in a row for these things. 

Presuming Endgame would be shown as film 7, that leaves me with 21 films to fill 6 spaces. 

I think you'd have to have Infinity War to lead into Endgame, so we're down to 20 films and 5 spaces very quickly. 

Some films are easy for me to cut. I know you can enjoy Endgame without The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man 2 or 3 or Spiderman: Homecoming (because I still haven't seen any of the 4 films mentioned, or not all the way through) so out they go. 

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 was mostly a re-tread of 1 so to save space, I will boot that one too. 

I am booting Thor: Ragnarok next because, enjoyable though it is, I think the inevitability of Thor forgiving Loki is present in every other Thor-featuring film and, because it's not clear where Bruce flies off too in Age of Ultron, his return might not need explaining. 

Doctor Strange is also skippable, because it mostly sets up its own sequel which we never got. I think the gist of Stephen Strange (sarcastic, excellent magic user, takes "thou shalt not kill" very seriously) is covered in Infinity War. 

13 films, 5 spaces 

This is where it gets tricky, because I have to try and figure out which of the characters get enough introduction and time in the "Avengers" films that I don't need to include their solo films. 

If I include Civil War, it may ease things for several characters. 

I don't want to get rid of Black Panther because it's my favourite of the Marvel films, but I think T'Challa gets enough of an intro in Civil War that it's doable, and I think Scott Lang falls under the same category so that's Antman 1 and 2 out too. 

9 films, 4 spaces 

My first attempt at this featured me cackling with glee because I might be able to boot Thor: The Dark World, which is probably the weakest of the MCU films. And then I remembered I couldn't because of the Frigga scene. As it does some very quick sketching of everyone non-Thor of the Asgardians and associated peeps, I fear it must be kept instead of the first Thor film. This makes me sad. 

7 films, 3 spaces 

I think Winter Soldier gets booted next. Very little of it is brought up again or needed to understand what follows. 

6 films, 3 spaces 

I think we need to keep Avengers Assemble for whacky time travel hijinks and the excellent fight that is called back to in Endgame. 

5 films, 2 spaces 

This is where I am having to hope Civil War explains Vision and Wanda well enough (that film is having to do some damn heavy lifting), so I can save space by booting Age of Ultron. 

4 films, 2 spaces 

I want to keep Iron Man in, because Tony needs to be the bookend, for bits of Endgame to work (see, L, I am going for thematic consistency). And I think Cap 1 needs to be kept for similar. 

Which means I have to hope that Infinity War provides enough of an intro to the Guardians gang and Endgame has enough Cap Marvel to make sense without her solo film. 

So, after all that, my 7 are: 

Iron Man 

Captain America: The First Avenger 

Avengers Assemble 

Thor: The Dark World 

Captain America: Civil War 

Avengers: Infinity War 

Avengers: Endgame 

Am I happy with that list? 

Sort of. 

Part of the problem is that I am having to cut some of my favourites out for some of my less favourites, and, like I said, having to keep in Thor 2 which is probably the weakest out of the whole 22, which makes me cranky. 

But the films that I have kept should make the important emotion-hitting parts of Endgame work. 

It's really brought home to me how good a job Marvel have done of making it a cohering universe where every bit matters, but I do now further understand D+R's complaint that the MCU suffers from continuity lockout if you're not willing to watch 4+ films a year. 

I'd be really interested to know other opinions on what the 7 films could be.