Carrying on from a discussion around Toby's performance pre and post his injury, I thought I'd look at similar data for some other players.
The graph below maps the amount of minutes the player spent on attack against the amount of total metres they ran. For all middles, metres doesn't measure a player's performance, but it's a very reliable indicator of how much attacking opportunity the player saw (how often his team had the ball when he was on the field). The trendline here shows up what we should
expect that player to do if he is playing consistently week to week. Anything a long way below the line is
less than expected so calls for further investigation.
While we can't really see evidence of Toby's injury in the data, we certainly can for BHU's.
For BHU
- Nearly all of the games before the Nani hip drop are above what is expected in terms of involvement (rounds 1-9).
- After returning from that injury (rounds 12-17) he didn't have any huge games but his involvement was still comparable to his early season output (close enough to the line to say he was doing his job as expected)
- When he got hurt on the opening kick-off of round 18 his output dropped and it never came back up to his earlier level except when he played really low minutes.
This is a really clear example of a player had an injury and then ran for less metres
than expected after returning - so either he was underdone or still injured (or both). Interestingly though, it also gives show us that BHU
is capable of coming back from an injury and quickly getting back very close to his normal level of involvement (though he did get lucky with the team having a bye in round 13).