Toothless

I have to confess that for the first time in a long time I switched the game off and went to bed with 10 minutes still on the clock.  I knew Edinburgh weren’t going to score in the time remaining and it had been too long a day to continue watching a blunt Edinburgh attack throwing themselves against a Glasgow wall.

So it came as no surprise when I checked this morning to discover that the last points in the match came through Stuart McInally on the 54th minute. And if I had merely looked at some of the key match stats and avoided the score I may have got my hopes up.

Territory: Edinburgh 61%

Possession: Edinburgh 60%

Rucks won: Edinburgh 98, Glasgow 64

Passes: Edinburgh 150, Glasgow 94

Scrum Success: Edinburgh 100%, Glasgow 86%

Lineout success: Edinburgh 24/25, Glasgow 6/7

However you know what they say about lies, damned lies and statistics.

The upshot is that despite plenty of possession and territory etc Edinburgh were toothless in attack.  Here's the comparison that backs up that assertion.

	No. of Entries into opposition 22	22 entry conversion into points	Phases in 22
Glasgow	6	4/6	41
Edinburgh	9	3/9	96

So, Glasgow made more use of their 22 incursions (66%) and used less energy per score (10 phases on average per try). Edinburgh only backed up their entry into Glasgow’s 22 by scoring points 33% of the time and had to have 32 phases on average to get each of those scores.

This has pretty much been the story of Edinburgh's season. 

Working too hard for too little return. 

Of the paltry 37 try total for the season 16 of those tries were from forwards and all of those were undoubtedly from multi phase close range drives or mauls. It doesn't matter how you score but in 2019-2020 forwards scored 10 tries out of a total of 67. 

It’s not good enough and there’s little point in hiding behind the effort made because that's not a metric that you see in league tables. It’s disappointing to have lost possession of the 1872 cup but it's more disappointing that as a team Edinburgh are regressing. 

It’s not the regression per se that’s troubling because if we won every game with 4 tries scored from driving mauls I don’t think I’d be that bothered about the style but it’s not really working and I'm not convinced the recruitment for the new season will make much of an impact on that particular issue.

We will see. 

Captains Challenge. First time I've seen this in a game I cared about and I don’t like it. It’s too much like a mandate for clipes. The game is long enough with regular TMO interventions without team captains running to the ref complaining that someone has been mean to their team. 

Not strictly a 20 minute red issue but do we really think that a petulant elbow to the head = a misjudged tackle in terms of match punishment? I know I don’t and don’t really buy the argument that full red cards ruin the game. It didn’t when Berghan was sent off in this fixture a couple of years ago (quite rightly) and sometimes maybe a team deserves to have their game ruined if their players can’t behave themselves.