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Welcome, sports fans!
As I write this week's blog I'm watching England finally turn up at the Cricket World Cup with a strong performance against India. However, even as I write this, I wonder if I've put the proverbial 'mockers' on the match and will shortly witness India rack up 100 runs in the last 10 overs and promptly bowl England out in a less than competitive reply.
What I am loving at the moment is the performances of Jude Bellingham and Harry Kane at Real Madrid and Bayern Munich, respectively. Whatever people's opinions on the level of competition within Europe's top leagues, it's great to see a couple of Englishmen tackling, and excelling in, environments away from the Premier League. Long may it continue.
Onto this week's round-up and it's fantastic to see the #ironviz entries beginning to come through. The dedication and passion on show in all the entries are to be admired. First up, we have Rob Taylor documenting the Harlequins Rugby team. The timeline on the left pulls the whole design together and it's brilliantly supported by some great visuals. Well worth checking out in more detail and congratulations on your first #ironviz, Rob. It's a stunner!
For our second #ironviz entry we turn to previous finalist, Sports Viz Sunday team member and all round good egg, CJ Mayes who explores the perfect set of tennis in which 24 consecutive points are won. So rare is this feat it has only been accomplished once in any of the four grand slams, going back to 1968. I love how CJ has gone into such detail and explored one single aspect of this magnificent sport. Laser focus!
Wrapping up the #ironviz entries we have an American Football themed design from Chira who has created this fantastic NFL team comparison dashboard. Pick two teams and see how they compare across a huge array of statistics from the 2023/2024. And, if you are a fan, make sure you bookmark this view as it will be updated as the season progresses.
Turning back to the regular entries for this week, we head back to tennis with this kaleidoscopic view of a similar story to that which CJ explored. However, in this view, Neil Richards looks at the Tennis set and those occasions when a perfect set is achieved with a scoreline of 6-0, otherwise known as a 'bagel'. I would highly recommend exploring the interactive version of this viz from, Neil. There is a huge amount to explore.
We switch sports now and take a look at the world of American Football. First up is Sports Viz Sunday regular, Brett2point0 who takes a look at passing yards and completion rates in this pareto chart / radar chart combo. Some interesting themes emerging for those close to the sport, I'm sure.
It's great to see Sekou Tyler rediscovering his creative juices and creating this brilliantly crafted dashboard tracking the key states for the Tennessee Titans. I love the simple and elegant design and sparing use of colour to highlight the key points. Welcome back, Sekou!
Finally, a couple of resources to share with you all. For those into American Football tracking then it's amazing to see that StatsBomb Football has released two full seasons worth of NFL data. In addition, there are some great instructions on how to create some cool views, like the one in the tweet below.
And last, but certainly not least, we have CJ once again with a tutorial which is a second-parter expanding on a previous pitch-mapping tutorial to add the pitch visibility aspect, essentially the view one would get viewing the game on television. Thanks for sharing, CJ!
That's it, folks! Enjoy your weeks and see you back here, same place, roughly the same time (depending on who is writing the blog!) next week.
Simon and the Sports Viz Sunday team.