Spot the difference? contact event frequency during > 30,000 women’s and men’s rugby union player matches across top domestic and international competitions

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dc.contributor.authorRoe, Gregoryen
dc.contributor.authorSawczuck, Tomen
dc.contributor.authorCollins, Neilen
dc.contributor.authorTooby, Jamesen
dc.contributor.authorOwen, Cameronen
dc.contributor.authorStarling, Lindsayen
dc.contributor.authorFalvey, Éannaen
dc.contributor.authorHendricks, Shariefen
dc.contributor.authorTucker, Rossen
dc.contributor.authorStokes, Keithen
dc.contributor.authorJones, Benen
dc.date.accessioned2025-05-13T08:54:20Z
dc.date.available2025-05-13T08:54:20Z
dc.date.issued2025en
dc.description.abstractThis study aimed to quantify the frequency of individual and team contact events during rugby union match play in top domestic and international men’s and women’s competitions. Analyst-coded player individual and team contact event types (tackles, carries, attacking rucks and defensive rucks, lineouts, scrums and mauls) from the 2022/2023 rugby union season were analysed from top domestic and international competitions across the world using generalised linear mixed models. For both women’s and men’s rugby, competitions generally had similar numbers of contact events per playing position. Where differences were observed, most ranged between 0.5 and six per contact event per full game equivalent (FGE). Similar trends were observed when comparing women’s to men’s rugby. However, within-game accumulation of these different contact events for certain positional groups may have a significant impact (e.g., a front five player called up from a Farah Palmer Cup team to play in WXV1 could be involved in as much as 6 more attacking rucks, 3 more tackles and 5 more mauls per game on average). Furthermore, the small differences between competitions per FGE may accrue across matches and thus result in far greater exposures across a season (e.g., a front five player in Premiership Rugby may make 48 more tackles over 20 matches than in Top 14 on average). Although a high proportion of contact events per FGE were similar between competitions and sexes per playing position, differences that were observed may have important implications for players transitioning between competitions and the long-term exposure of players to higher-risk contact events.en
dc.description.statusPeer revieweden
dc.description.versionPublished Versionen
dc.format.mimetypeapplication/pdfen
dc.identifier.articleide12307en
dc.identifier.citationRoe, G., Sawczuck, T., Collins, N., Tooby, J., Owen, C., Starling, L., Falvey, É., Hendricks, S., Tucker, R., Stokes, K. and Jones, B. (2025) 'Spot the difference? contact event frequency during > 30,000 women’s and men’s rugby union player matches across top domestic and international competitions', European Journal of Sport Science, 25(5), 12307 (9pp). https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsc.12307en
dc.identifier.doi10.1002/ejsc.12307en
dc.identifier.issn17461391en
dc.identifier.issued5
dc.identifier.journaltitleEuropean Journal of Sport Scienceen
dc.identifier.urihttps://hdl.handle.net/10468/17440
dc.identifier.volume25
dc.language.isoenen
dc.publisherJohn Wiley and Sons Incen
dc.rights© 2025, the Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group on behalf of British Society of Audiology, International Society of Audiology, and Nordic Audiological Society. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly citeden
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectCollision sporten
dc.subjectGame demandsen
dc.subjectInjury preventionen
dc.subjectPerformance analysisen
dc.subject~Medicine - Journal Articles~en
dc.titleSpot the difference? contact event frequency during > 30,000 women’s and men’s rugby union player matches across top domestic and international competitionsen
dc.typeArticle (peer reviewed)en
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