Round 10, 2014 Penny

Technical Analysis prior to R10, 2014

By Penny Dredfell

Added 20 May 2014

While fundamental analysis (used by most media tipsters) takes into account the ability of the two competing teams, the home ground advantage, injuries, team changes etc, technical analysis looks for trends and patterns which explain the otherwise inexplicable.

Reviewing last week: the Dons were terrible last weekend. In retrospect, the fact the they underperformed against Brisbane (albeit with a win) should have signalled a big downer was about to occur – and a downer it was, indeed!

Now for this week: this is the week when several teams coming off the bye play teams second up from the bye. As a general rule, the team second up has the advantage, with scores (these are how well they performed against expectation) in 2012 and 2013 of 12, -56*, -13, 55, 35, 18, 10, -1 and -10. The average is +5; or +13 if you remove the 56* – which was GWS in 2012 when they were dropping off badly in the latter part of the year.

This trend benefits the following team this week: Collingwood, Richmond, Suns and Adelaide.

The other trend to note is team which have a shocked straight after the bye. For teams performing 30 points or more worse than expected, they performed on average a whopping 42 points better than expected (sample of 5, with all 5 doing better than expected).

If we select team performing 15 points or more worse than expected, then the average is still a healthy 33 points better than expected (sample of 11 with the “worst” result being 11 points worse than expected).  This noted (and hugely significant in a statistical sense) trend is a positive for Geelong, Collingwood and Richmond.

Putting this all together, and taking into account the experts predictions for the upcoming round, the following is suggested:
Collingwood (expected to win by 4 goals anyway) are absolute certs against the Eagles
Richmond (expected to win by 4 goals, but many tipsters will want to jump off) should win; they are borderline total certs
Geelong (expected to win by 2 goals) should be tipped, but without huge confidence against the up and down Kangaroos
Gold Coast Suns (expected to win by 4 – 5 goals) look to be the certs of the week
Adelaide (expected to win by a goal) would normally be favoured to win by more than that BUT they do have a 10 day break following their other big break (12 days) after the bye.  It would feel like 2 byes in a row for them.  So the suggestion would be to tread warily on this game