Pre-season games are a bit like someone letting one rip on a public bus. It happened but for the most part nobody mentions it. Later you might say, “jeez someone farted on the bus yesterday and it was ripe” but apart from that novelty value you soon forget it ever happened.
Pre-season fixtures are on most clubs' websites going back a couple of years but after that they kind of drop off a cliff.
Regular games - records go back more than 10 years.
Tries - don’t count in stats unless scored in competitive matches
Appearances - aren’t noted until there's something at stake.
But for a man who likes a stat like myself they have merit. It’s where future stars, like Connor Boyle, get their first outings. It’s where you find your club playing strange teams, like Edinburgh did when they played Romania in such a fixture.
And in Edinburgh’s case where a distinct lack of imagination is evident from the fact we’ve played Newcastle Falcons 8 times in pre-season games since 2007.
And because pre-season fixtures get such little love it becomes hard to find details of the games as you’ll see from the half finished chart below. Yes, I've googled it. Yes, I've gone to page 3 and 4 of the search results, yes i’ve trawled Youtube but this list remains incomplete.
The question is, do the pre-season results have any bearing on the actual season? In Edinburgh’s case probably not.
With reference to the caveat above only 3 times in the last 14 years have Edinburgh won both of their pre-season fixtures.
In 2011 we won away at Sale and at home to Newcastle. We then went on to finish 11th in the league. In 2015 we played 2 games at home and won both against Romania and Ulster and then finished 9th in the league.
Those were arguably our worst ever seasons in the league.
If you go back a bit further to 2008 we also won both pre-season games against Wasps and Bath respectively. That year those early wins did seem to augur well as we went on to finish 2nd in the league.
That was our best ever league finish.
So pre-season clean sweeps can't really predict what will happen when the real competition starts but as of today I can’t tell you what two pre-season defeats can do to you because even though the table is incomplete it at least hasn't happened since 2014
Armageddon or Nirvana only time will tell.
As mentioned earlier this table is incomplete. If you have results/dates of the games that are missing them please let me know in the comments or by email at burghwatch@gmail.com.
Your reward will be a name check on the page. Generous eh?
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