Ireland have seen a lot of success on the rugby field recently culminating in a Grand Slam win last weekend. A statistic that is frequently thrown out is how few penalties Ireland are conceding in matches and the impact this has on their results. It stands to reason that conceding less penalties is going to greatly benefit any team. You are reducing potential chances for a kicker to put points on the board, reducing chances for set pieces in good attacking positions or even just taking away chances for the defence to clear their lines.

Now lets look at how this affected things in the Six Nations just gone. Ireland once again came out strong conceding the least amount of penalties by a fair margin. They only conceded 6.8 penalties per game for the tournament, 1.2 ahead of Scotland in next place. England and Italy fared worst conceding 11.6 penalties per game each. This is a big change for England from their 2017 Championship winning season where they were only conceding 8 penalties per game. This deterioration is just one part of how the team has slipped in the last year. On the other hand Scotland have made the exact opposite move, going from 11.6 penalties last year down to 8 this year. Wales also improved by 2.4 penalties per game to get them into second place.

As well as averages over the tournament, there were also very well disciplined individual match performances from teams. Wales only gave up two penalties in the loss to England. While three of Ireland’s five matches appear here conceding 3, 4 and 6 penalties. The other top five performance was Scotland who gave away 5 penalties against Italy.

After seeing the England v Wales match where Wales still lost despite only conceding 2 penalties I wanted to look at not just how the overall number of penalties affect a match but the difference between the two teams. Some matches are just more penalty prone depending on the weather, a certain ref or maybe just the two teams that are playing. But in this case does conceding less penalties than your opponent make a difference. I judged this by looking at the penalty difference between teams, subtracting a teams penalties from their opponents. In this case a negative number is indicating less penalties than your opponent while a positive number is more and bad.

For this Six Nations four of the five teams were giving up more penalties than their opponent in a loss. Wales were the only team who had a negative penalty difference in a loss, probably coming from the -8 difference in the loss to the English. Ireland came in with -3.4 for the tournament, only conceding more penalties than their opponent against England (11 penalties to 12). This is another area you can see England’s struggles. They gave up up 2.5 more penalties than their opponents even in a win making much harder work in those games. France came in with the best penalty difference in a win, albeit only for two wins, with 6.5 less penalties than their opponents.

As well as looking at the teams I thought it would be important to look at the individual players themselves. Below we have the worst 12 offenders for the tournament. Everyone else came in with 2 or less penalties. I actually expected some players to come in with higher numbers so it must just be bias on my side picking them out more regularly in matches. Slimani came out on top giving up 6 penalties for the tournament. My guess would be a few of these occurred at scrum time although I don’t have the individual offences.

While researching this I also wanted to try and find out how much conceding penalties actually affects a teams chance of winning a match. It would be easy to look at Ireland’s recent success and their low penalty count and assume they must be linked or how closely the average penalties per game table matches the overall standings. But I wasn’t entirely convinced so I dug a little deeper. For the 2018 six nations the team who gave up less than 10 penalties in the match had a win percentage of 64%. If they gave up less than 6 penalties that went up to 75%. Looking at the penalty difference the team who gave up less penalties than their opponent won 73% of the time. The issue with this is the extremely small sample size of only 15 games in a single six nations season.

Expanding this out to include the last 6 seasons (2018-2013), gives a much clearer look at the numbers. Now a team who gave up less than 10 penalties in the match 57% of the time and won 61% with a favourable penalty difference. Things looked similar when you looked at the tournaments that run over a season rather than a few games. The rugby championship had a high percentage for teams with a favourable PD with 81% but for the current Aviva Premiership season and the 2017 Super Rugby season this was only 54% and 53% respectively. The total penalty count followed in a similar fashion.

Taking all the teams from Super Rugby, Aviva Premiership and the Pro14 (I tried the Top 14 but my data was having issues) I took a look at which teams are performing the best in the penalty department. Exeter came out on top in terms of conceding the least amount of penalties and conceding less than their opponent. But you can see this does not always mean a team is successful. Ospreys have only won 6 out of 16 games but appear quite high on both tables. I also thought the Highlanders were interesting coming in with the 8th least amount of tackles but with 0.9375 PD, meaning they give up very few penalties but so does their opponent.

The final aspect of the research I did was in terms of the impact of each individual penalty on the overall game. This came from rewatching the England v Ireland game where 4 of Ireland’s penalties occurred in 3 minutes period between 25-28 minutes and another 3 came in another period between 78-81. This accounted for 7 of their 12 penalties. But impact did these penalties have. Three of the first four could be called quite cynical in trying to stop England scoring a try, which they almost did, but at the cost of a yellow card. I want to try and find out how much these penalties and consequences affect the game and its outcome. I have only analysed the 23 penalties in the England v Ireland match so far which is not enough to draw any conclusions on yet.

So from all of this it looks like conceding fewer penalties does help a team win but its definitely not everything that’s involved. In a short tournament where winning is all that matters it could be vital as kicking those penalties could make all the difference. But in a longer season with more bonus points at stake, teams might be more likely to pass on the posts to get another try. At the end of the day conceding penalties is just handing the ball to the opposition which is never going to make things easier for your team.