Sam Larner

taking less out of their energy defending, whether it's the Leinster side or the Nienberg defence, as we would typically expect them to be, frying out the line, putting a huge amount of pressure on them.

And there's actually a stat, so an excellent analyst called Kavek Blake, who a lot of people probably know him from Twitter and Blue Sky and such, so he created a metric called Passes Allow Defensive Action, which I think has come from football.

So one of these is essentially if you're playing very passively, you would allow the attack to move sideways across the pitch before you went up and made the tackle.

Whereas if you're playing very aggressively, you wouldn't allow them to make those passes.

You would hit them basically man-in-ball when the fly half gets the pass.

So what we've seen is that this year has been the lowest length passes allowed per defence faction that we have seen in the last six years.

So 0.79, below the average of the league.

In fact, it's the eighth lowest we've seen out of the 92 team seasons in that period.

So it's a fairly aggressive defense.

However, worth mentioning, that is the same number as they had in 2021 to 22.

So we're not talking about necessarily reinventing the wheel.

Or if we are, the outcome is more or less the same as it was.

And of course, for those people who think, I don't care about those kind of detailed metrics or I just want the total numbers.

So the first full season lengths they had with Neymar, they can see you 14.1 points per game.

That's the second lowest in the last 10 years.

The second season, which is this season, 21.1 points per game, which is the most in the last 10 years.

So they flip-flopped from almost the best defensive team lengths to have been in the last 10 years to the worst defensive team they've been within one season.

I think it's interesting.

So I think there's two seemingly unrelated factors going on.

I think the first one is, I think he'd been limited by perhaps there was the idea of he's got the keys to the castle, and he can kind of do what he wants.