Below are listed the teams in the top division and the points scored and conceded at home and away.

Listed below is the average winning margins at home and away. The average points are also converted into the advantage the home team has. The third column is the average extra points that a team scores at home compared to away, and the fourth column the average less points that a team will concede at home. Adding these two gives the 'advantage', the points advantage that a team has when plays at home, compared to if they were playing away.

Winning Margin

Interestingly, two teams from the North, Sale and Newcastle, appear to like playing away more than at their home! They both score more, and concede less when playing away. By contrast Leeds seem the most dependant on their home support. Playing at home gives a massive 25 point boost to them. Likewise, Bath and Wasps, both struggling this year, seem to be relying on home form to maintain their push away from the relegation spot. Bath in particular have been woeful away from home. They are the only team not to reach a scoring average in double figures in away matches and are yet to claim a point away from home.

Tigers top home and away

Northampton, Saracens and Bristol, all in mid table, enjoy a reasonable advantage at home. Gloucester seem to like playing at home the most out of the top teams, with the Tigers slightly behind. However it is clear why the Tigers are top of the league with the highest average winning margin in both home and away matches.

Looking ahead to the weekend, Tigers are playing Saracens away. The home fixture this year finished 36-10, a 26 point win. Therefore my prediction is Tigers by 15 for Saturdays game. Of course, if you look at it from the point of view of the Saracens then that means the winning margin will be 19. These are, after all only averages.

Turn to Europe

The above table is for the league. When the Tigers play in the European Cup, what happens? Here is what I calculate:

Winning margin

So in the Heineken Cup, the Tigers appear to rely on home advantage more. They are miserly in defence, conceding less than 10 points a game. Against Llanelli Leicester won 12-9 at home and lost 12-24 away, a difference amazingly close to the average! So in the semi-final, as it is a home draw, Tigers should win by about 3 or 4 points, by these figures. The winning margin at home is slightly larger than in the league, while away it is smaller. You would expect teams competing in Europe to be harder to score against, so maybe the Tigers are more up for the big European games.

Shoot Falcons fans?

So what does all this mean? Should Newcastle and Sale shoot their supporters and move to a nice warm area down South? Should Tigers bribe the people who do the draw for Heineken Cup ties to give them home advantage (which, according to some posts on the message board they do)? The answer is not really.

These statistics don't mean anything - there is nowhere near enough data to be able to give reliable averages. However it is interesting to compare the performance of teams at home and away, something which isn't generally very easy as rugby tables don't usually separate them, as is the norm in football. The league table shown above was obtained from RugbyMail and was the only one I could see that did this.

What seems to be evident is that a lot of teams rely on home form. The struggling teams are very reliant on winning at home. Gloucester, second in the table have only won once away from home. Tigers , on the other hand, have lost only 2 out of 7. So maybe this points to what really separates the men from the boys - the teams ability to win away from home.