Okay, here’s my blog post about messing around with Georgia’s national rugby team data.
Alright, so I was bored the other day, right? And for some reason, I got it into my head to dig around and see what I could find out about the Georgia national rugby team. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t tell ya.
First thing I did, naturally, was fire up the old Google machine. I started with a basic search: “Georgia national rugby team.” Just wanted to get a feel for what was out there. Ended up on their Wikipedia page – figured that was a good place to start, y’know? Got some basic info, their history, current rankings, all that jazz.
Then I thought, “Okay, but who’s actually PLAYING?” So, I started hunting around for roster info. That took a little more digging. Found some stuff on official rugby websites, and some fan sites dedicated to Georgian rugby. Pieced together a list of current players, their positions, the clubs they play for… the whole shebang.
But just having a list wasn’t enough, I wanted to get my hands dirty. I decided to try and pull some stats. This is where it got a bit tricky. Official stats are scattered all over the place, and not always easy to find. I ended up having to scrape data from a couple of different websites, which was a pain, let me tell you.
After struggling with website scraping (thank god for some old Python scripts I had lying around), I managed to get some decent stats for a few key players. Tries scored, tackles made, games played… that kind of stuff. Nothing super fancy, but enough to get a sense of who’s who on the team.
Now, what to DO with all this data? I could have just left it in a spreadsheet, but where’s the fun in that? I decided to try and visualize it. I messed around with a free data visualization tool, and created a couple of simple charts. One showing the distribution of players by position, another comparing the try-scoring rates of a few different players. They weren’t gonna win any design awards, but they got the point across.
Honestly, it was a bit of a rabbit hole. Spent way more time on it than I probably should have. But hey, I learned a few things about Georgian rugby, brushed up on my web scraping skills, and made some pretty mediocre charts. All in all, a productive waste of time. Maybe next time I’ll tackle a real data project… or maybe I’ll just watch Netflix. Who knows?
So yeah, that’s the story. Just messing around with the Georgia national rugby team data. If you’re ever bored and have a few hours to kill, give it a try. You might be surprised what you find.
- Got the data.
- Cleaned it. (sort of)
- Made a chart. (barely)
- Wrote a blog post about it. (here it is!)
And that’s that. Peace out!
