South African Sides Aren’t Taking This Seriously
It wasn’t so much they didn’t win where we thought they would – only the Bulls and Lions were predicted to win this weekend – but that the margins of defeat were so much larger than expected.
The Sharks and Stormers were beaten by 32 points more than expected, the Cheetahs lost to Cardiff by 15 more than expected, and the Bulls losing to Northampton by 9. A huge underperformance relative to what the Algorithm would have expected from the normal strength South African squads, and a real measure of how they are approaching the tournament.
Much has been made of the devaluing of the competition by fielding weakened teams with the huge travel distances incurred by the inclusion of the South African teams, but clearly something has to be done when the results are this poor. Perhaps back to back fixtures in South Africa – similar to the URC schedule management – might help teams acclimatise and make better use of the large travel time.
French Indiscipline
We’ve had 4 (I think?) red cards in the first two rounds, and all of them were from French teams. In fairness 75% of them have come from Stade Francais with their 3rd this weekend a truly remarkable hit from Macalou who showed well and truly how you deal with a scrumhalf. With a return to the ‘good old days’ he put in a classic 1-2 shot on Van Zyl, first by deliberately tripping him up from the base of the ruck before finally finishing him off with a swinging arm to the face when he was on the ground.
Not so much as a brain fart as a full on brain hemorrhage, Macalou had clearly decided that he wanted a good few weeks off a Christmas. Either that or Van Zyl owed him money. Thankfully Hollie Davidson kept her bottle and sent him walking.
The Usual Suspects Are There
It’s looking like a two horse race at the moment, with the Algo split very evenly along the lines of last years finalists Leinster and Toulouse. Whilst few would be disappointed if there was a repeat of last year’s epic clash between these two sides, it is worth noting that the Algorithm still has it that there is at least a 50% chance that the title will be lifted by someone else. Who will that be? Well it could be anyone really. Saracens and Bordeaux look best of the rest, but there’s not much in there at the moment. We’ll have to wait a little long to see how the group stages pan out, how the knockout stage paths look to see who the most likely challengers are.
The Bookies Odds Are Terrible
We know that the bookies odds are skewed in their favour (the house always wins right..?!) but the odds on the winners of the Champions Cup at this stage are truly awful.
The odds can be translated into percentages and then used as a proxy for who the bookies think might win the title. However, when this is done it becomes clear just how much they have skewed these odds in their favour and how poor the opportunities are for fans. We’ve looked at the odds out there and as can be seen from our Bookies Analysis below you can see the bookies odds add up to 134%. Before the Champions Cup had started they were even worse, up at around 140%.
The odds are usually much worse on full ‘season long’ tournaments as fans find it harder to intuitively assess the proper chances, and therefore the bookmakers can get away with offering poorer odds than they can on a single match with (roughly speaking) only a win or loss outcome.
Our bookies analysis section takes care of this disparity for you, calculating the each teams chances using our machine learning generated predictions and then simulating each tournament 10,000 times, properly assessing the chance each side has of making it to each stage of the tournament. We then compare these to the bookies odds and scour the market to see if any opportunities exist – as you can see above, very few are present in the Champions Cup! However, to see all tournaments, and all matches every weekend, check out the analysis section below.
