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Commonwealth Games Selection Tournament | Analysis of the Women’s Side
tl;dr
* Winners Grimson-Mumby had the best stats overall * The higher rank teams tend to have the better point-scoring, attacking and defence stats * Seem to be no correlation with serving, passing and blocking stats on tournament ranking * Tournament stats can be skewed depending on who you play and how well you played
Introduction
Volleyball England recently held a tournament in Crystal Palace, London to determine which beach volleyball pairing would go on to represent Team England at the Birmingham 2022 Commonwealth Games. Six top men’s and women’s pairings battled it out over the four days for this honour. Congratulations to Javier Bello/ Joaquin Bello and Jess Grimson/ Daisy Mumby for winning the whole thing. Commiserations to the other five teams, especially the two runners-up Issa Batrane/ Alex Bialokoz and Anaya Evans/ Ellena Austin who really pushed the winners and gave us an exciting final, which was contested over a best of three matches.
I was present to stat every single match. This was really in an effort to be a part of Team England’s Performance Analyst for the event. Just being there to show my face to the teams and I could have a good chunk of data on the winning players. The other advantage is having a dataset to do some analysis on. I’ve already looked at the best performing players statistically so I wanted to do some general analysis of the tournament, starting with the women’s side. You can read about my analysis on the men’s side on this link.
Best Team Stats
Below are the performance indicator stats for every team that competed in the Commonwealth Games Selection Tournament. For the full stats, go to the end of the blog post. You can see the winning women’s pair of Grimson/ Mumby were the best performing pair in four technical skills measured (point-scoring, attack, blocking, defence) and in the top three in the other two technical skills measured (serve and passing). I would say, at least statistically, they are the deserved team to represent Team England in the Commonwealth Games.
Does the Stats Match Their Tournament Rank?
The first chart below shows a general trend that the higher-ranked team, the better stats they have for point-scoring, hitting % and dig in-play%. From my research into valid performance indicators in indoor volleyball, these are, in order, the most critical performance indicators related to success in volleyball (see link for more information). My reasoning is to win a tournament or league, you need to win matches. To win a match, you need to win three sets. To win a set, you need to score 25 points before your opponent does. So the ability to concurrently score points and not lose points in errors should be critical to winning sets. Since most points are won and lost via the attack then the ability to effectively attack is critical too. The ability to defend, i.e. stop the opposition’s attacks, is important too. This should be similar to beach volleyball.
In the second chart below, it does look like there isn’t such a trend for serve, block and reception. In the future, I may do some statistical testing to see if there are actually any significant trends.
Why Are Palmer-Snow Stats Really Good Yet They Placed Fifth?
One glaring inconsistency is the blip on the chart by Palmer-Snow. They have the third-best point-scoring efficiency and hitting in the tournament, in addition to being the second-best blocking, serving and passing in the tournament. So how come they finished 5th overall? Total stats can be skewed depending on who they played and how well they played. In the case of Palmer-Snow, two of their four matches were against Brand-Nicholson, who was the lowest-performing team in the tournament. You can see in the chart below that they had great stats against them which would boost their overall stats. However, it is not to say that they deserved 5th overall. They did take third-place Keefe-Tucker in the pool match to three sets (19-21, 25-23, 15-13) with a great performance. It was just they had a terrible match in the quarter-finals against Canevari-Canevari (the Canevari sisters also played out of their skin too to win that match), which dropped them in the 5th vs 6th place match.
Why Were the Finals So Close Yet the Stats Suggests Otherwise?
The finals were contested as the best out of three matches. For those who watched, the finals of Grimson/ Mumby and Evans/ Austin were extremely close. It went to the third set of the third match. However, the tournament stats show that Grimson/ Mumby was the superior team so it should not have been that close. So I wanted to know what was going on here.
Like with the Palmer-Snow stats, it could be that the stats could be skewed depending on who they played and how well they played. So I compiled the four head-to-head matches between the two teams (1 pool, 3 finals). The radar chart below still shows that Grimson/ Mumby has superior stats in five of the six technical kills compared to Evans-Austin. More importantly, they were far superior in the two critical stats of point-scoring efficiency %, hitting % and dig %.
So the totals of the head-to-head matches do not really explain how the final got so close. So I split the data to see the individual match-by-match data of the four head-to-head matches. Below is a column chart showing the point-scoring efficiency of the head-to-head matches on a match-by-match basis. You can see that Grimson/ Mumby was super consistent at around 22.5% to 25% point-scoring efficiency. Their only dip was the second finals match where they lost. You can see that Evans/ Austin’s first two matches against Grimson-Mumby were not the best but they really stepped up in the last two matches. The third match (16.9 point-scoring efficiency) was enough to win as Grimson-Mumby dropped their level (11.2%). They achieved their highest point-scoring efficiency (18.8%) in the last match but Grimson-Mumby was able to step back up their tournament point-scoring level (22.5%) and this was enough to win the match and the overall tournament. I did not look at the other skills but I would imagine it was a similar story (and there are too many graphs already).
Final Thoughts
It was interesting seeing all the data and delving deeper into how some stats does not seem correct. Grimson/Mumby did have the best stats overall so they are the deserved winners. Evans/ Austin did run them close but Grimson/ Mumby was too consistent.
It also seems like point-scoring, attacking and defence stats are correlated to tournament ranking while serving, passing and blocking do not. However, statistical testing is really needed to confirm it.
The full team stats can be found below. Click to enlarge.
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