Michael Hooper - a love hate relationship?

(Photo credit to abc.net.au)

Michael Hooper is a real conversation starter on the various Rugby sites covering the game in the Southern Hemisphere.  These conversations tend to move quickly into heated arguments, reflecting the love or hate that the various fans have for him as a player.

In their condensed form the arguments for Michael Hooper tend to be grouped into the following categories:

1. Age based arguments which focus on his youth relative to his achievements, musing on his potential for the future.
2. Arguments which focus on his accolades to date as a sort of "well if they rate him, who are we to say any better sort of argument".
3. Statistical based arguments, which are self explanatory.

There have also been some common themes in the arguments against Michael Hooper.  These tend to centre around the narrative that has developed on the internet about Hooper, namely that he is ineffective and/or absent at the breakdown (more on the role of these narratives in a later post), and include that he:

1. Lacks the size and physicality at the breakdown to affect turnovers, secure ball and add weight to the contact area.
2. Plays too wide, often like an outside centre, again reducing his ruck involvement (which leads to the usual arguments surrounding the traditional role of the flanker in Rugby).
3. The perceived lack of breakdown work from him places huge pressure on the other moving parts of the Wallabies already fickle forward pack.

In this series of articles on Michael Hooper I want to dig a bit deeper than these often trumpeted arguments for and against him, in the hope of finding (or maybe not finding) some definitive facts on which to base a solid opinion on his play. 

To do this, I will be looking at each of these arguments in greater depth, and adding some statistical and analysis techniques that I have picked up from the US (mainly in the context of basketball) but also in other sports.  At this stage this analysis is largely limited to publicly available statistics, but I am in the process of developing a statistic gathering tool in addition to a video analysis tool which I hope to make available as soon as possible to the discerning Rugby reader of this blog.

I hope you enjoy the series.

John