Sports News

Six Nations: The stats superbrains fine-tuning England’s tactics


Tozer, left, and Hamilton-Fairley have become a more integral part of England’s preparation after a slump in form in 2018
Guinness Six Nations: England v Wales
Venue: Twickenham Stadium Date: Saturday, 7 March Kick-off: 16:45 GMT
Coverage: Live on BBC Radio 5 Live, BBC Radio Wales & Radio Cymru, with text commentary on BBC Sport website and app.

Where does the slender difference between winning and losing hide?

On the training pitch? On the tactical whiteboard? In your star player’s pre-match imagination as they visualise a key passage of play?

As Eddie Jones’ England run out against Wales at Twickenham on Saturday, it may be in a line of code running on a laptop 10 miles across town in Balham.

Gordon Hamilton-Fairley and James Tozer, 28 and 26 respectively, will be the men staring at the screen.

Both played rugby at university, but neither to a particularly high level. Hamilton-Fairley rates himself as “incredibly average”, Tozer trumps him, but only just, at “very average”.

Jones’ opinion of the pair however is considerably higher.

In his autobiography published in November, the Australian lauded their work as “amazing”.

Hamilton-Fairley and Tozer are employed to tease out tactical truths from the avalanche of data that accompanies every top-level Test match, picking out the key statistics amid the static.

The view that Tozer and Hamilton-Fairley tend to have on matchday

Every week they feed data from the previous round of matches into a series of coding scripts and machine-learning models.

Out of the other end comes the success rate for various tactical choices, potential vulnerabilities for each team and the tactical tendencies they tend to fall back on.

These, along with six closely guarded metrics the pair have identified as key to Test success, go into two reports that land on Jones’ desk at Pennyhill Park shortly after the final whistle – one reviewing England’s performance on the weekend just gone and another assessing the opposition to come.

The algorithms that drive Netflix plotlines,