Home Advantage

By Richard Lindsley and Smurf
June 10 2006

Home advantage is one of the most widely used phrases in sport. It is ingrained in our rugby culture so much that we try to reinforce the notion with bold statements such as: “Fortress Franklins”.

We’re further convinced after an away loss and the old chestnut: “we’ll beat them at our place,” gets a jolly good airing. The question I’m left asking myself is: Does home advantage really exist and if so why?

Smurf kindly did some number crunching and his stats on the Zurich/Guinness Premiership for the past three seasons and also England brings some illuminating results.

Over the last three seasons, 396 Premiership games have been played (excluding playoffs). Overall, 57.3% have been home wins, 37.6% away wins, and 5.1% draws. Home advantage also shows strongly in winning margin – 64.7% of all home wins denied the opposition a losing bonus point (i.e. winning by eight or more points) compared to only 38.9% of away wins.

Of the ten teams continuously in the Premiership in the three seasons (that is, the 06/07 lineup minus Quins and Worcester) only Gloucester has gained their highest winning margin away from home – last season’s 41-9 defeat of Bristol exceeding their best score at Kingsholm, a 38-12 victory over Sale in 03/04, by six points. Wasps came closest to this, in the 2003/4 season their fixtures over Saracens came out 41-0 at home and 42-3 away.

The above fixtures also point out one of the most humiliating of results – that is being “nilled”. Only five of nearly four hundred games have resulted in one of the teams not scoring. Wasps have handed out two of these – the one against Saracens and a 28 point haul against Leeds last season. Saints and Leicester have exchanged fixtures – Saints coming out 14 points to the good in 03/4 but Leicester ending up 32 points over at Welford Road in the first game of 05/6. The remaining game – Gloucester getting 16 points against Quins – was the only game where a home team failed to score.

As the East Midlands derby has been brought up, most will recall Saints being the first to beat the Tigers at Welford Road in 57 league matches. Well, after some subsequent defeats, Leicester have now not lost since January 2004 at home in the Premiership – a run of 25 games to date. Bath, Newcastle and Sale have come closest to breaking the run – all three teams getting draws at Welford Road.

A brief analysis of the England team since the World Cup (up to the end of the 2006 Six Nations) shows that, while they lost five of thirteen home games, the biggest loss was only six points – 13-19 to Ireland in 2004. Compare this with their smallest winning margin, which was ten points – against Wales in 2004 and Australia in 2005. They have taken quite a beating on the road though – only three of eleven away games saw them come away with the spoils, two trips to Rome and one to Murrayfield not fairing well in comparison to the visits to Brisbane, Paris, Dublin, Dunedin, Auckland and Cardiff – as well as a reversal at Murrayfield.

So what exactly causes the home advantage? Well there are many theories some more scientific than others and some not relating to player performance. Dorothy Gale brings the first and most obvious explanation to us: “There’s no place like home!”

Familiarity is a big factor in confidence and as King Carlos himself tells us, confidence is a key factor in a successful performance. We can see this in our home lives, as we are far happier and comfortable in familiar surroundings. The same goes for work and getting to and from work. There’s no rocket science here is there! So widely is this theory touted in sport that Huw Richards of the financial times was seriously troubled by the self deprivation of home advantage in this years Heineken Cup with Leicester at the Walkers Stadium, Biarritz in San Sebastian, Munster at Lansdowne Road and Toulouse at the football stadium where we have played and lost against them twice. He stated: “To give up that familiar dressing-room in which every player has his own peg and locker and the peculiar local knowledge of that bumpy patch near one corner flag and the way the wind swirls in the lee of one grandstand, to deprive your fans of their regular seats, neighbours and pre-match routines has its perils.”

As we know two of those home teams lost and even more significantly it was the two most successful teams in Heineken Cup history. Toulouse were blown away by an excellent performance but Leicester…well let’s just say they weren’t themselves.

Well that’s the common sense out of the way let’s get to some science.

I want to talk manliness, well, to be more precise, testosterone. Some top notch braniacs at Northumbria University, Sandy Wolfson and Nick Neave, tested Under-19 association footballers from a premiership team. They took saliva samples from the players before training sessions, home matches and away matches. The home and away samples were against the same teams. The results were remarkable. For the training and the away matches testosterone remained within the normal adult male range for the home matches it was significantly increased and for the goalkeepers it was hugely increased. I’m no endocrinologist but I do know that increased testosterone is linked to higher levels of aggression and physical dominance. They attributed this to territorial behaviour and in the players being highly motivated to defend their own territory.

Then we have referees and the part they play in home advantage. To all the regular loud mouths with their cries of: “OFF-SIDE” and “HOLDING ON” and “FORWARD!” you may be annoying but you are not wasting your time. Due to…BIASED REFEREES! The long-standing suspicion that refs are homers apparently is grounded in truth. Again the research was carried out in association football. Professor Andy Lane of Wolverhampton University said: “Referees tend to under-penalise the home team. A referee will tend to wave play on rather than penalise the home team, and the referee will seek to penalise the away team.”

Alan Nevill also of Wolverhampton University took video footage of 47 tackles from a premier league match and then showed it to 40 qualified referees. Half of them had the crowd noise on and the others watched in silence. Neither group saw the refereeing decisions made during the match. The group watching with the noise on judged 15% less of the home sides tackles to be illegal when compared to the group watching in silence and perhaps most interestingly the group watching with the noise on were far more likely to agree with the actual decisions made during the game.

There are times though, when home advantage has been shown to work against players. Penalty shootouts in football have clear trends. Firstly that class will out. However when teams are of very similar ability the away team is statistically more likely to win. Daniel Finkelstein in The Times wrote: “The best way of guessing who will win a shoot-out is that, 60 per cent of the time, it is the away side. There appears to be an away advantage. It may be that the home crowd puts too much pressure on its team. Perhaps it is time to stop choosing to shoot towards your home fans.”

So there’s a challenge for someone…does home advantage affect penalty kick success in our sport? I’d be interested to hear from anyone who could work this out.

This last bit will have the stalwarts of c bloc getting very very very hot under their collars. Crowd effect. In my brief literature search (I’m not even remotely suggesting I did this scientifically,) I found lots of reference to crowd effects and not one bit of evidence that we positively influence the players. Personally I find that a bit unbelievable. In some matches it almost feels as if we’re on the pitch with them. That home match against Gloucester springs to mind with Sharky sent off and the cherry and whites laying siege to our line, we roared every tackle and the roof nearly came off as we turned over their scrum. Surely we weren’t losing our voices in vain. More research required I’d say!

So to sum up we’ve seen through Smurf’s excellent figures that home advantage is alive and kicking in both domestic and international rugby union. Sadly all of the research I found was about our round ball cousins where a very similar situation is reported to exist. From this evidence it would appear that home advantage is caused by: familiarity, increased testosterone and referees favouring the home side. I’d like to throw one more theory into the ring (with apologies to Terry Pratchett for blatant plagiarism,) HEADOLOGY.

Because we believe in home advantage we benefit from it!

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