Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Round 12 Results: Planets Align for Round 13 Showdowns

The planets seem to have aligned as we look towards Round 13 of the 2011 ARTTSL Championship, which coincidentally will see 1st (Canberra) play 2nd (Sydney), 3rd (Newcastle) play 4th (Illawarra), and 5th (Brisbane) play 6th (North Queensland).

Mathematician Paul Thompson says it is not necessarily an entire coincidence, but that there may be an underlying numerical symmetry in the way the draw was programmed. "This can happen when automatically generating draws. One way to overcome this is to randomly shuffle the rounds as a fine step, but it seems Wilkington Tuffy didn't consider this, unfortunately. This is probably also why there were few top-of-the table clashes in the earlier rounds of the season".

The match of Round 12 was Canberra's epic win over Illawarra in Canberra. Canberra jumped to an early 5-2 lead before Illawarra squared it 5-all at half-time. Canberra made another break to 9-6, only for Illawarra to claw back again to square it 10-all. The sides then traded points on serve until Canberra finally prevailed 16-14.

In the other major clash, North Queensland consolidated their place in the top 8 with a hard-fought 12-10 win over Singapore. By contrast Singapore have now slipped out of the top 8.

Canberra and Sydney are now 4 points clear of their nearest rivals as they prepare for their Round 13 clash. No doubt the winner will be clear favourites to secure the Minor Premiership with just 6 rounds to go after this weekend, before the finals series.

Tasmania now languish 19th on the table after a dismal 11-5 loss to the Gold Coast. Meanwhile Angus and Patsy remain unaccounted for. Recent rumours suggest they may currently be continuing their holiday in Cyprus, having been tracked down by the media in Spain.

ARTTSL Premiership 2011, Round 12 Results
Darwin 11 d Ipswich 9 at Darwin
Melbourne 12 d Perth 10 at Melbourne
Adelaide 11 d Geelong 9 at Adelaide
Newcastle 11 d Greater Blacktown 6 at Newcastle
North New Zealand 11 d Brisbane 5 at Brisbane
Gold Coast 11 d Tasmania 5 at Gold Coast
Canberra 16 d Illawarra 14 at Canberra
North Queensland 12 d Singapore 10 at Singapore
Sydney 12 d Sunshine Coast 10 at Maroochydore
South New Zealand 13 d North Melbourne 11 at North Melbourne


2 comments:

paul.thompson@mathblog.com said...

To explain further the way the draw was programmed it's effectively, if inadvertently, split the teams into two halves and teams are pleying teams in the other half first, and it's turned out one half is stronger than the other. That would also help to explain Illawarra's dream run in the first half of the season, now they've hit a bit of a wall as they start facing the tougher teams in the second half of the season as the stronger teams start squaring off.

Paul Thompson

jay@uwwws.edu.co said...

Hi Paul,

Another way to manage this scheduling problem is to seed teams when assigning base allocation numbers, most specially the teams from 1 to 4.

Jay