Commentary

Perhaps the biggest sporting event held in Australia since the Sydney Olympics – and one more likely to be worn without destroying the national psyche for years to come – the 9th edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup travels to the Antipodes for the first time, Australia and New Zealand uniting to each host half of what can probably be the best tournament yet. With the cycle being timed well enough to avoid public hoo-hah about COVID (it’s still a thing, be careful, mask up if you think it’s wise), the 2023 edition of the WWC has both a wider cast than ever before – reaching 32 teams for the first time, although still to fall behind the men’s – and a wider range of teams that might actually be able to win the whole thing.

Many pundits have the USA, twice-reigning champions and horrifyingly intense supporters, as favourites to add to their trophy cabinet further. However, European football has been evolving in huge steps since the last cycle (i.e., the big European countries are actually taking it seriously), and several of the UEFA titans look to have a good chance – Germany are hoping to claim another title, England might be able to succeed where their men haven’t, but our model goes with Spain as the pre-tournament favourites, having a 21% chance of making their way through the tournament to lift the trophy on August 20th.

As for how that model works, it’s on a principle that should be familiar to regular followers of this (now nearly-abandoned) blog. On our base dataset, we’ve looked at every senior women’s fixture since the completion of the 2019 World Cup – the Olympics, continental tournaments, qualifiers, invitational tournaments, the lot. Even friendlies, something which we’ve taken a different approach for from the men – there are a lot more high-profile friendly matches between near-full-strength teams in women’s football, and they help make the dataset a lot more solid. In addition, we don’t have to make adjustments for confederation strength, considering the relatively higher number of cross-confederation matches thanks to the evenness of the higher echelons (four of FIFA’s six confederations had top 10 teams at the time of the draw).

So, from taking that dataset and cleaning it up slightly – looking at the 90-minutes score for games that included extra time, and removing the Great Britain Olympic games – we get 1,415 games between 177 different countries, from an 11-0 win by the Philippines over Macau back in August 2019 to a 2-0 win for Hungary against Bosnia-Herzegovina last night. From there, we look at the number of goals each team has scored and conceded, and compare them against how many they should have scored and conceded based on their opposition (sadly, xG is a fair way off universality, otherwise we’d be using it a lot more).

Using those numbers as modifiers, we extend that out onto a fixture for the World Cup and come up with an “average” score for if these matchups were played thousands of times. Using Poisson distributions and R, we then do “play” these matchups hundreds of times, tallying up the winners and seeing how we do (when we ran a simulation to prove it to ourselves as we wrote this, Spain beat Germany 5-2 in the final; Australia didn’t make it out of the group stage). We’ll adjust this as the tournament goes on, not only simulating from the existing results but updating our stats further based on how teams over- or under-achieve based on our expected results. To our eyes, we concede that there’s maybe some overestimation of the weaker teams, overestimation of Europe, and underestimation of North America, but on the whole these look like solid tips to us.

Our projections are above, and will hopefully be updated daily (you’ll have to scroll slightly and use different tabs of the embed). But if you’ve read this far, you’ll appreciate our pre-tournament strength ratings:

Woe be upon the Sydney Sixers, whose MBBL campaign came to a close with a shambolic performance on their home ground. Winning the toss and choosing to bat themselves, a very sluggish innings with only seven boundaries saw them fail to reach a run a ball, the largely-untouched Brisbane Heat bowling lineup bowling very tightly. The batting from the Heat was spotty, but hero Michael Neser made a career-best 48* at No. 7 to steer Brisbane home with an over and a half to spare.

Tonight, all eyes go to Perth Stadium to watch…what seems like it could be predetermined, the Perth Scorchers by far a stronger team on paper and prepared to win their fifth MBBL title (and second in a row). T20 is a very funny game, though…

Four days ago, in the last MBBL game of January (the summer holidays ending for much of Australia), the Brisbane Heat fairly casually qualified for the preliminary final despite Shaun Marsh’s efforts for the Melbourne Renegades. Close to 11,000 – including yours truly – attended the Docklands game, and while the cricket may have not been the greatest game ever the environment and atmosphere was enough to hope for a future for the MBBL.

Of course, the scheduling problems the MBBL face are shown by the squib tonight’s game may become, with the internationals who’ve so helped the Brisbane Heat leaving for India (some taking longer than others). This leaves them with an understrength squad to face the Sydney Sixers, who are without Steve Smith but still have a strong XI and should be comfortably too strong, setting up another tantalising final.

Sean Abbott looked close to steering the Sydney Sixers into the final for the fourth year running, taking three wickets in the powerplay to leave the Perth Scorchers on the ropes. He wasn’t counting on the efforts of hometown favourite Ashton Turner, who celebrated the aftermath of his 30th birthday by making his highest T20 score ever, 84* in just 47 balls, as the Scorchers won and further improved their rating.

The Sixers’ chances of making the Grand Final are down to ‘just’ 66%, the lowest they’ve been in two weeks, simply because they don’t have the option of going in direct anymore. They’ll be watching tonight’s game to see who they meet on Thursday night – the Brisbane Heat travel to Docklands Stadium to meet the Renegades, who’ve been very inconsistent this year but could make an unlikely preliminary final with a win.

Rain in Sydney – shock – led to an anticlimactic elimination final last night. After Usman Khawaja’s stunning 94 steered his Brisbane Heat side to 5/203, a sluggish start to the Thunder’s innings meant that after they were taken off in the seventh over for rain, they were behind on the DLS target, and the Heat made their way to set up a return clash with the Melbourne Renegades for a spot in the preliminary final – imagine that at the start of the season.

Their opponent will be decided tonight, with the loser of the game in Perth having to take the long route to a likely Grand Final appearance. The Scorchers start very slight favourites over the Sydney Sixers, but this game could really go to either team – and the winner will have the highest Elo rating we’ve ever seen; in fact, if Perth win they’ll be further above the average than any team’s been below it, a real surprise.

It took all the way to the last game to decide the makeup of the finals, especially after Hobart’s miracle victory over the Brisbane Heat in the early game. Despite some wobbles, though, the Sydney Thunder took out victory against the Melbourne Stars to jump to fourth and give the MBBL its first ever final at the Sydney Showgrounds.

It feels like somewhat of a waste, considering that the finals system is already heavily stacked towards the top two and those teams are by far better than the rest of the competition. That said, the Thunder are still rated better than ‘average’, and we have the odd result that – despite the fact they need to win one more game – they’re slightly more likely than the Melbourne Renegades to win the title on our model. If they win, the Renegades await on Sunday night.

There was some trouble on the way, but things might have finally come good for the Melbourne Renegades – after three consecutive wooden spoon seasons, the win over Adelaide last night delivered Red Melbourne a 7-7 record for the season and guaranteed them a home final…precisely who they play remains up for grabs.

In fact, considering how close it looked a few days ago, the finals equation is fairly simple: the last spot in the finals goes to the Thunder, unless they lose and the Hurricanes win. The precise locations are a little more complicated, but it’s still set for a fun final day.

Steve Smith couldn’t complete his hat trick of centuries, but the Sydney Sixers continued their dominant form with a comfortable victory over Hobart last night. The game didn’t have much meaning for the magenta side – who were guaranteed second place anyway – but it made things a little more difficult for the Hurricanes, who’ll be watching on to see if they can still make a last-minute leap into finals.

The top two teams are the only ones who’ve completed their 14-game roster, meaning the last two days are all for games that could decide the finals series. Considering the terrible net run rate of the Sydney Thunder, they’re effectively trapped on 11 points as opposed to 12, meaning that the winner of tonight’s game is guaranteed a spot in the five. If the Strikers lose, they’re out; the Renegades have a little bit of leeway to qualify but will want to settle things tonight.

Both of yesterday’s games were a) high-scoring, b) far closer than they should have been), and c) all that was needed to seal up a ladder position. At the early game in Brisbane, the Heat almost threw away a golden position against the Stars, but held their nerve for a four-run victory – dooming the Stars to last place on the ladder.

Later on, in Perth, the Scorchers tallied up 62 in the powerplay against the Renegades – David Moody having to be taken out of the attack after just one legal ball – on their way to 5/212. Needing 100 off the last six overs, the Renegades came far closer than they had any right to – Aaron Finch going from 16 (16) to 76 (35), including the highest-scoring over in MBBL history – but still lost by 10 runs, Perth’s victory securing top spot for them and a home qualifying final against the Sixers on Saturday night.

The Sixers have little to play for in tonight’s game, but their opponents Hobart have everything. Winning tonight would push the Hurricanes up to fifth, and would mean they could guarantee a finals spot with a win over the Heat on Wednesday. If they lose, though, they’ll be reliant on other results.