Two Games Too Much? Super League's Easter fixtures by the numbers

This debate seems to get trotted out every year now. An overseas coach will come out in the media and criticise the Easter schedule, and a home grown representative of the game will come out and defend the Easter double header.

The main argument against the fixtures is player welfare and whether its right to put these athletes out there for back to back matches in the physically intense sport of modern rugby league. Other concerns are also raised about how good an advert for the game the second fixture is - the feeling is they will lack the intensity of the Friday games and the other weekly rounds, you might see a drop off in performances and end up with very one sided fixtures, which isn't good for the sport.

The supporters of the double-header often hark back to the tradition of the Easter weekend in the sports calendar. Its seen as being positive for the games to be on bank holidays during school holidays as it should have a positive impact on crowds. The best defence of the fixtures I've seen came as 'tackle two' of Guardian journalist Andy Wilson's most recent 'Set of Six' blog - that these games give youth their head as senior players don't have the time to recover and the matches are a bridge between academy competition and the usual intensity of other Super League rounds.

However, I'm not going to go over what other people have said, I'm going to look at the numbers - two numbers in particular: 1) attendances and 2) points difference in the games. I've looked at the last 10 seasons and compared Good Friday (GF) fixtures, including ones played Thursday nights, with Easter Monday (EM) fixtures, including the odd Tuesday night games, and also included the season averages (for 2013, this is averages after first 10 rounds). The numbers are summarised in this table:

The boxed figures indicate best of all figures. Bold indicates the better of the two that year. Red indicates the figure is worse that the average for that season. Obviously, the higher the attendance the better, the lower the points difference the better.

Attendances
The crowds have always been better on Good Friday, apart from the highest figure being 2007's Easter Monday. The best explanatory factor is that the first proper Hull derby for years was staged at the KC on that Easter Monday. Wigan also travelled the Leeds, so the best two supported clubs met on that Monday, and four of the five worst attended clubs that season hosted Good Friday games, which weren't all derbies in this year.

Since 2008, four or five genuine derby matches have taken place in each set of Good Friday fixtures, whereas 2005 and 2007 were the only years where Easter Monday saw a derby take place. The influence of derby games in the crowds being high is clear - teams tend to get their highest crowds against their closest rivals, particularly in the big derbies Wigan-Saints, Leeds-Bradford and the Hull derby, that make up the bulk of the aggregate attendance at Easter and see similarly strong crowds in reverse fixtures.

A noteworthy observation is six of ten Easter Monday rounds have seen lower average attendances than the season average, including all of the last five years - two years are significantly lower, 2010 and 2012. This goes against one of the common defences of the Easter fixtures, as Easter Monday games are no more popular in general than average weekly rounds - although its worth noting the weekly round figures benefit from the inflationary Magic Weekend, but even taking this into account 2010 and 2012 were below average and 2004 had no Magic Weekend.

Looking beyond average attendances for the whole round and focusing on the crowds at the individual games gives some more perspective. Not including 2013 as the season isn't over yet, on the Good Fridays I looked at there were 58 games. In 41 of them, the crowd was bigger than the home team's average for that whole season. 9 of those games weren't derby matches, and the 8 that were below the home team's season average all were not derby matches. On the Easter Mondays, 26 of the 58 games (including 1 derby) saw higher crowds than the home team's season average, 32 games (including 1 derby) saw lower crowds than the home team's season average - more than half.

Maybe that second game on Easter Monday isn't as big a deal with the fans as the game's administrators think.

Points difference
The general trend is Good Friday games are closer than Easter Monday games. Seven of the ten years saw a closer average points difference in Good Friday games over Easter Monday games. Also, six of the ten years sees a higher average gap between winning and losing teams than the season as a whole saw for Easter Monday, some a number of points wider, when that is only seen in two of ten Good Fridays. The overall average for Easter Monday also suggests less competitive matches in general than all regular season matches during the entire period.

One notable exception is 2008, where Easter Monday saw the closest games of any Easter round in the period. Actually, that season, both rounds saw mostly close games - 8 of 12 ended within two scores - but the difference was two one-sided results were seen on Good Friday and only one, with a smaller points gap too, on Easter Monday that year.

I've broken it down a bit further to see how close individual games were, beyond the averages (as these can be skewed by massively one-sided games like Warrington at Salford in 2010 and Wigan at Hull KR this year). Categorising a close game as one that finishes with a two score (12 point) difference or less and a blow-out as 30 point or more difference between the teams, gives these results:

2004 to 2008 had six games in each round, 2009 onwards had seven games each round.

Good Friday sees more close games and fewer blow-outs than Easter Monday, supporting the averages. More than half the Good Friday games are close, and I'd note 12 of these close games weren't derbies. Of the 11 Good Friday blow-outs, 6 were derbies. Nearly half of the Easter Monday games were close. Only two traditional derbies were played on Mondays during the 10 years - one was a close game, one was a blow-out. These figures suggest that a game being a derby doesn't have a great deal of influence over how close a match might end up being.

All of this suggests games aren't as close on Easter Monday, which is less exciting for the fans and it's not a great advert for the sport that over a quarter of the games are one sided blow-outs over the years. The average points difference, number of close games and number of blow-outs all support the commonly held notion that Easter Monday games lack the intensity and competitiveness of Good Friday games, or of the average weekly round.

A lot of observers also point out that it isn't just the second game in three days that causes players and competitiveness to suffer, but it's also that third game in little over a week that suffers too. In seven of the nine years 2004-2012 (inclusive), the weekend after Easter has seen an average points difference for the round of 19 points or more, so the average game is decided by more than three converted tries. This shows that round suffers for competitiveness too - again, not a great advert for the league.

Edit: I've decided to throw in the figures from looking at the 'third' game of the Easter schedule, the rond after Easter Monday. I'll let you draw your own conclusions from it...


Summary
Overall, I think it's reasonable to conclude that if we were to lose the Easter Monday fixture it wouldn't be the worst thing for the sport. The crowds aren't brilliant, the games can quite often be a bad advert for the league, and it extents that effect to the week after too.

I'm not saying it should be taken from the calendar, but I do think the RFL should have a proper think about whether this scheduling is worth keeping. I feel the drawbacks out weigh the positives. A re-think could be to get Sky buy-in to have a extended televised schedule of games but only play one round over the weekend - say, Leeds-Bradford on the Thursday night every year, Wigan-Saints on the Friday afternoon, Castleford-Wakefield on Friday night, London-Catalans Saturday, Huddersfield-Salford Sunday, Hull derby Monday lunch time and Warrington-Widnes Monday evening - still televise four games like they do at the moment, or all of them would be nice.

...and finally...
Whilst I've been looking at these numbers I'll just make another couple of points.

1) The crowd numbers for this season are concerning, only averaging 8,718 as it stands. We have the Magic weekend, the reverse derby fixtures and the important games at the season end to help get that figure up. Plus, it has remained wintry cold to this point of the season, meaning many fans may have chosen to or been forced to miss games due to the weather. Lets hope for a dry and warm summer to bring fans in.

2) Whilst the RFL Chief Exec Nigel Wood came out after Good Friday to proclaim this as the most competitive year in Super League history, the current average points difference per game of 19.6 is actually higher than seen in 13 of the 17 completed seasons (as all figures shown, this is correct as of 2013 round 10). On the flip side, with another 17 rounds to be completed there have already been 7 drawn games - the record for a whole summer season is 8 in 2003. Also, when Wood came out with his words it was after round 9, when the difference between the top club and bottom club was the narrowest margin ever seen at that stage of a Super League campaign (10 competition points). Of course, this just shows that you can chose the numbers you want to support your argument, and in reality, for all the entertaining close games we've seen this season so far there have still been plenty of one-sided affairs - I just think the weaker teams are more capable of beating the stronger teams in one off games now, which compresses the league table.