Azkatro posting for the Panthers.
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Cutting out the Middle man
The game of rugby league in Australia has a serious problem when it comes to official record-keeping practices.
There is a name that is often raised in rugby league circles when talking about statistics. That name is David Middleton. He has become synonymous with the game, frequently being mentioned alongside facts and figures about the game. Middleton made his name in the 1980s when he took over the role of editing the official rugby league annuals.
Over the years, Ive noticed more and more that Middletons name crops up everywhere when it comes to rugby league facts and figures. You name it, and his name is there newspaper articles, press releases, television broadcasts, and reference books including player biographies. As the years have passed, its struck me more and more that his name is so completely and absolutely intrinsically associated with Australian rugby league records, he must be doing very well out of it.
Typically, one would assume that the games official record keeping is handled by the body which runs the game itself. But in the NRLs case, it doesnt seem that way at all.
A friend of mine, also a stats head, recently got in touch with a prominent Sydney club to ascertain what sort of records they had on file, and what if anything we could gain access to in order to compile for our own research.
The answer we got was a surprise. Well, kind of.
We were told that the club itself had forked out a significant amount of money to obtain data about their own club. Thousands of dollars, in fact. And they didnt pay for the privilege in order to provide it to their patrons, or the public, or anyone for that matter. It is solely for the clubs own records. In fact, they indicated that they wont provide access to the information due to a fear of it being tampered with.
They also said that most clubs have their data supplied to them by David Middleton for substantial fees, and they accept that his data is the most accurate available on the game of rugby league.
So the clubs are paying David Middleton substantial fees for records about themselves, and presumably being asked not to share it around. Clearly Middleton is a businessman and doesnt want anyone handing out what he may even consider his intellectual property.
This situation may go some way to explaining why we have found some conflicting information regarding the number of first grade games Terry Lamb played throughout his career. The official stats state that he played 349 games. However weve got him listed in the team sheets of 350 matches in total. Obviously we dont want our info to be wrong, so weve spent quite some time trying to track down the erroneous game.
Season by season, our numbers match all official records, bar two. In 1980, current official sources say he played 17 games. However those same official sources used to say it was 18. Where or why it was changed, we dont know.
A representative from Wests Archives advised us that they have 18 games for Lamb in 1980 in their records.
The other discrepancy occurs in 1986. The official Bulldogs website lists 23 games, while we have 24. All sources agree that Lamb scored points in 22 games that season, which for us, left two the Round 6 match against North Sydney and the Major Semi Final match against Parramatta.
We quickly confirmed that Lamb definitely played in both of those matches. He missed a conversion in the Round 6 match, and is not only mentioned in several reports of the Major Semi, but appears and is mentioned by Ken Sutcliffe in a news report of the match found on YouTube.
Interestingly, after our findings were reported by prominent league writer wdnicolson.com (@NRLTweet on Twitter), and we were roundly abused by a couple of passionately perturbed individuals who insisted we were just spreading crap.
Its intriguing how much faith some place in information thats tagged as official. Even though the information is proprietary and sold off for exorbitant fees.
How do we know they didnt discover a mistake with Lamb and tweak their numbers to retain credibility?
We dont know the answer because the data is a closed book. We might never know.
But well do our best to find the truth.
And when we do, well share the info to everybody for free.
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747 words. Liftoff!