Top underdogs: After a decade of the Championship split, number-crunching reveals the best provinces at punching above their weight
Aaron Goile crunches the numbers to see how Championship teams have fared in comparison to their Premiership counterparts.
Could Hawke’s Bay have been the best provincial rugby team in the country this year?
That’s one of the great unknowns, thanks to the Premiership/Championship format in New Zealand’s premier domestic rugby competition – the Mitre 10 Cup.
The Magpies took out the second-tier Championship division, but played footy which seemed to rival, if not better, Premiership winners Tasman.
This year marked the 10th season of the split format, with New Zealand Rugby having opted for a top- seven, bottom-seven structure from 2011, but it was one which still saw cross-division play. NZR is now looking at potential changes to the competition again. So, after a decade in its current form, what have we learnt? The Sunday Star-Times has crunched the numbers to see how the Championship teams have fared in comparison to their Premiership counterparts.
THE OVERALL NUMBERS
Each season, there are four crossover games for the seven Championship teams, equating to 28 fixtures in total where they are ‘ expected’ to lose, going on seedings.
But, overall, out of the 280 cross-division matches across the 10 years, the Championship team has won 82 of them, along with there being four draws.
That is a win rate of 29.29 per cent – effectively three victories out of every 10 crossover contests staged. Not a bad strike rate at all for the ‘underdogs’.
By season, that win percentage for Championship teams has stayed fairly consistent, ranging from 21.43 per cent in 2012 thanks to a six-win, 22-loss record, up to 39.29 per cent in 2013, where there was an 11-17 ledger.
For four years between 2015-2018, Championship teams won seven games. This year it was eight.
Overall, the average winning margin for Premiership teams in crossover matches across the decade is less than 10 points, at 9.74.
The last three years it has remained consistent, between 12.21 (this year) and 13.
Interestingly, despite this year’s competition being played later in the year and into better weather, teams’ points scoring was down in crossover games.
Championship sides averaged just 18.46 per match compared to an overall average across the decade of 21.58, while Premiership outfits scored 30.68 in 2020.
That’s compared to an overall figure of 31.32, and 33.96 in 2018 and 34.61 in 2019.
WHO’S THE BEST CHAMPIONSHIP TEAM?
Across the 10 years of this format, there have been two teams who have never featured in the Championship division – Auckland and Canterbury.
Conversely, there are two teams who have been in the
Championship every year – Northland and Otago.
Of the 12 teams who have spent time in the Championship, there have been eight different winners, but only one team – Hawke’s Bay – have won the title more than once, with their 2020 crown adding to their 2011 and
2015 successes. But which team, when playing as a Championship side, has the best record in crossover contests?
Which team thrives on puffing out the chest and showing their more fancied opponent what they can do?
Well, no team has won more games than they’ve lost, but on percentages, Waikato (2-2), Wellington (6-6) and Tasman (6-6) are top, with a 50 per cent record from their brief stints in the lower tier.
Four other sides have a better winning percentage than the overall average of 29.29 – those being Hawke’s Bay (40.63 from 32 games), Taranaki ( 37.5 from eight), Manawatu¯ (33.33 from 36) and Otago (32.5 from 40).
Bay of Plenty ( 29.17 from 24) are basically right on the average, Northland (22.5 from 40) a bit further back, and, for all their recent struggles, Southland ( 19.44 from 36) aren’t exactly an embarrassment.
Ironically, the two sides with worse crossover stats than the Stags have actually won Championship titles.
Counties Manukau are an abysmal 8.33 per cent, thanks to a 1-11 record, while North Harbour aren’t much better, at 12.5 per cent from 24 games, having remarkably lost all of their first 14 efforts.
WHAT DOES IT TAKE TO GET PROMOTED?
No Championship side has ever won all four of their crossover games in one season.
But only once has a Championship team lost three and gone on to earn promotion to the Premiership – that was Counties Manukau in 2012, where they then hammered Southland in the semis and Otago in the final.
In 2016 the victorious North Harbour also managed just one crossover win, though they also notched a draw against Tasman to help them push into third spot which saw them then win successive playoff games on the road.
The other eight years, though, the data shows that the team that wins the Championship nabs at least two Premiership scalps.
In the last three seasons, along with in 2015, that was done by way of a two-win, twoloss split, while there have been four years where Championship teams have gone an impressive 3- 1 in their crossover
Which team thrives on puffing out the chest and showing their more fancied opponent what they can do?
games.
That was achieved in 2011 by Hawke’s Bay, in 2013 by Tasman, in 2014 by Manawatu¯ and in 2017 by Wellington.
On the other side of the coin, teams that have gone on to win the Premiership title have five times gone 4-0 in their crossover games that season, and five times gone 3-1.
And the only time a Premiership-winning side has dropped a crossover game at home in that same year was in 2018, when Auckland lost 31-26 to Otago at Eden Park in round seven.