When Ian Madigan arrived onto the field as a second half replacement for the Wolfhounds against the England Saxons, RTE television commentator Hugh Cahill, after a Madigan pass at first receiver, said that passsing the ball was what we’ve come to expect from him.

Madigan is indeed a tremendous passer; if you haven’t seen his ridiculous cross-field thirty yard bullet pass in person yet then prepare to be impressed. The distance, speed and incredibly flat arc on the pass doen’t really come across on tv and it’s a sight worth seeing. So yes, Madigan is a great passer. But does that mean that Leinster would become more of a passing team with Madigan in the ten jersey?

While Jonathan Sexton’s move to France will have consequences for the Ireland setup and for him personally, the largest foreseeable impact will be upon Leinster. There has been much wailing at thought of Leinster life without Jonathan Sexton. Some voices have already called for an experienced replacement to be immediately parachuted in during the summer, preferably of southern hemisphere origin. Other voices have called l for Ian Madigan to be thrown the keys to the Leinster bus and let him get on with it. After all, when the first game of the 2013-14 season comes around Madigan will be the same age as Sexton was when he took the post-Contepomi reins. And that seemed to go quite well indeed.

Past performance isn’t a guarantee of future success but it can still provide insight. In order to perhaps shed light on how a post-Sexton Leinster team might play it seemed like an interesting idea to do a statistical comparison of how Ian Madigan and Jonathan Sexton have played for Leinster over the last couple of years.

How to do this? Well it’s not as easy as it sounds. There’s not much point at comparing them while playing different positions, as they have done often this season, and they cannot of course both start at fly-half in the same game. Sexton has played all of Leinster’s Heineken Cup matches at the position so we can’t run a proper comparison in that competition. But in the Pro12 things are different. Since the beginning of the 2011/12 season Ian Madigan has been handed the number ten jersey plenty of times. More than Sexton has, in fact. So let’s look at how they got on.

Important Stats Note: the Pro12 stats used in this piece are incomplete as the following games are missing*:

• 09/09/11 Dragons (Madigan)
• 17/09/11 Glasgow (Madigan)
• 28/10/11 Edinburgh (Sexton)
• 09/02/12 Treviso (Madigan)
• 05/05/12 Dragons (Madigan)

* Why are they missing? Beats me. Not being part of a large organisation holding a contract with a large stats provider I rely on publicly available data sources or others that I can get hold of on a somewhat unofficial basis. That being the case, I haven’t been able to find game data for the five games listed above. While individual Pro12 teams have contracts with Opta for data collection and analysis I know that in general terms the league office does not see the central collection (never mind availability) of detailed stats as being a priority. I have spoken previously to the league office about getting more detailed playing stats into the public domain but they believe there is no demand for them. If, like me, you disagree then I can only suggest you get in touch with them (perhaps at @RaboDirectPro12) and perhaps they might be some day persuaded to change their minds. Or perhaps they’re right and it’s just me who’s interested in this stuff. But I think they’re wrong.

Even without game data from those missing five matches we’re still left with a decent sample of games from the 2011/12 and 2012/13 seasons which either Ian Madigan or Jonathan Sexton started at fly-half*:

* Two other players have started a Pro12 game at fly-half for Leinster in the the same time period (11/12 & 12/13 seasons). Name them (answer at the end).

At the time of my writing this piece, that starts figure for Sexton fairly pops off the page. Yes he’s played Heineken Cup matches and tests for Ireland in that time but when you consider that Jonny Wilkinson has played thirteen Top 14 matches for Toulon this season alone, thirteen Pro12 matches for Sexton over one and a half full seasons is quite remarkable. Thank you, IRFU game management.

In no particular order, here’s a few things that might be interesting when imagining Madigan as Leinster’s #1 fly-half next season and beyond.

Tackling:

Defence is a major factor in differentiating Jonathan Sexton from his peers and that comes through in the stats with a 90% tackle success rate. That figure could potentially have been even higher but for an ugly four missed tackles in last season’s Pro12 final against the Ospreys; apart from that blip he hadn’t missed more than one tackle in a league game. Ian Madigan’s comparison is interesting in that while his tackle rate is slightly lower at 88% he managed to make one tackle more per game than Sexton. Both players had the same peak of ten tackles in a game with Sexton managing the feat without a single miss.

Carrying:

Both Sexton and Madigan are known as strong runners from the ten slot but in terms of simply beating men the understudy wins going away. In his sixteen games Madigan beat 23 men with ball in hand, easily more than double Sexton’s rate of just seven in 12 games. Sexton on the other hand was slightly better at making a clean break in the first place. Both were generally equal where offloading was concerned, managing around one each per game.

Kick/Pass/Run:

This is the interesting bit. A kick/pass/run split measures what a player first decides to do when they receive ball in hand. As a vague point of reference, the kick/pass/run split for the 2012 Autumn Internationals in its entirety was 9%/51%/39%; for the 2012 Six Nations it was 10%/50%/40%; for the 2012 Rugby Championship it was 11%/50%/39%. That split covers all players, from full-back to hooker, and on all teams so various running or kicking strategies unique to particular teams are smoothed out when the stat is taken on the whole.

Neither Sexton nor Madigan’s splits look anything like that. And that’s not unexpected. At the fly-half position one would expect to see more kicking and more passing than, say, a ball-carrying back row forward. And a fly-half at Leinster would be expected to do a lot more passing than kicking, given the emphasis on that style of play in the Schmidt era.

The interesting thing is that Madigan and Sexton’s split profiles differ from each other in ways that might be unexpected based on the conventional “Madigan the passer” wisdom:

Ian Madigan’s 20%/60%/19% split shows a very balanced profile compared to Monsieur Le Sexton’s 14%/74%/13%, having been about one quarter more likely to kick or run than Sexton in a season and a half of Pro12 games.

So Madigan’s more of a kicker than Sexton, right? Not so fast. Sexton’s played a lot more games than just the Pro12.

Looking at the 31 games Jonathan Sexton started at fly-half for Leinster in the Heineken Cup since the 08/09 season he shows a different profile of 20%/67%/13%; it perfectly splits the difference between Madigan’s profile and his own pass-focused profile in the Pro12 from the past two seasons.

Probably too neatly. Let’s look at just the last two seasons, just as we have the Pro12. In the fourteen Heineken Cup games Sexton has played this season and last he has come in at a 17%/70%/13% mark, splitting that kicking/passing difference once again. This is the profile of a player kicking less and passing more as his career advances, but his running always remaining stable even when taking into account differing approaches between his Pro12 and Heineken Cup play.

While it’s interesting to see how Sexton’s game has changed, the fact is that he won’t be wearing a Leinster shirt next season. But Madigan will be. And those stats above say that in terms of first option taken Ian Madigan is simply not a passing fly-half when compared to Sexton.

If Madigan were named as the Leinster starter next season would we see a difference? Almost certainly, both in Madigan and Leinster. Differences in tactics would be dictated by the opposition on a given day and that would certainly affect how Madigan would run the game. Strength of opposition too would be an important consideration – it’s a lot easier to leave defenders trailing in your wake in a Pro12 game against Airioni or Zebre than a crucial Heineken Cup match in Clermont.

But even taking that all into account there’s still a lot of running instinct and ability in Madigan that any coach would probably be best trying to nurture rather than trying to stifle in order to fit a rigid, pre-ordained game plan.

To finish, let’s throw in Madigan’s sole Heineken Cup start at ten (a 25-3 win vs. Montpellier) and see what it looks like…

18%/59%/23%.

Small sample size be damned… the man just loves to run.

ANSWER: Matt Berquist and Noel Reid