Activity and recovery cycles and skill involvements of successful and unsuccessful elite rugby league teams: A longitudinal analysis of evolutionary changes in National Rugby League match-play

ABSTRACT

We investigated changes in activity and recovery cycles and skill involvements: (1) during National Rugby league (NRL) match-play from 2004 to 2014 and (2) among successful and unsuccessful teams over the same period. Teams were divided into 4 tiers according to final ladder position: (A) 1st–4th, (B) 5th–8th, (C) 9th–12th and (D) 13th–16th. Total, mean and maximum ball-in-play time decreased, while recovery time increased from 2004 to 2014. Offensive and defensive skill involvements changed differentially over time with moderate to large reductions in the number of play-the-balls, offloads and missed tackles, and moderate to large increases in the number of passes, tackles made and ineffective tackles. The gap between Tier A and Tier D decreased for mean activity time and the proportion of short (<45 s) ball-in-play periods. Conversely, the gap between Tier A and Tier D increased for skill involvements, with Tier A completing more play-the-balls, and Tier D performing a greater number of offloads, and total, missed and ineffective tackles. Our results demonstrate the decreasing ball-in-play demands of NRL competition over 11 seasons. However, our data also highlight the narrowing gap in ball-in-play demands, and increasing gap in skill involvements between the top tier and bottom tier teams.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance analysis
• team sports
• time–motion analysis

Acknowledgement

The authors wish to thank Ken Quarrie (New Zealand Rugby Union) for his critical review of early drafts of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.