On Home Advantage, And Making It Count

Make your home ground a fortress. A venue other teams don’t like visiting. Win your home games, pick up what you can on the road. Home advantage. A home draw. The importance of playing at home in sport is seldom undervalued.

The last few weeks have thrown up some interesting examples. Take Royal Challengers Bangalore in the Indian Premier League. Any team with Chris Gayle in their side is never going to struggle but their position at the top of the table owes everything to their performances at home. Played six, won six. They have lost their three matches away from the M Chinnaswamy and if they are to progress, they need to pick up points away from home, with five more away matches to come.

Rivals Chennai Super Kings have won all three of their away matches to date although have lost two at home, which is unusual for them.

homeadvThe graphic above, from Wikipedia, shows the home win/away win split in this year’s IPL

But what advantage can you get from playing at home? In most sports such as football and rugby, pitch dimensions are almost identical wherever you play and conditions aren’t something you can control. Cricket, though, is entirely different. The home side has final say on pitch dimensions – remember Hampshire pulling the boundaries in a few years back to nullify Sussex’s spinners? – and of course what sort of pitch will be prepared.

The best example of this in the 2013 Indian Premier League is probably Rajasthan Royals, who are getting the best out of green-tinged pitches in Jaipur with a bowling attack of fast and medium pacers – Siddharth Trivedi just as important a cog in the blue machine as Shaun Tait while James Faulkner has become the latest Australian to enhance his global reputation by coming into the IPL as a largely unknown quantity and taking bags of wickets/scoring bags of runs (cf. Shaun Marsh, Aaron Finch).

Like Bangalore, they have a flawless home record and have also nicked an away win, beating Delhi Daredevils by five runs.

The football season is coming towards its conclusion in Europe, with two-legged domestic play-offs and European semi-finals also bringing the home advantage debate into focus.

It’s often said that it’s better to play your home leg second, but how useful is it to be playing at home, like Barcelona and Real Madrid will be, when you carry a four or three goal deficit into the game? If the support of your own fans and familiarity with your own ground might be good for a one-goal advantage, there is no way at the top level it counts for three or four.

The other argument here is that should a game go to extra-time and you are at home, you get an extra 30 minutes at your place, although it didn’t help Inter Milan against Tottenham in the Europa League and one round later, FC Basel couldn’t score in the extra 30 minutes against Tottenham; they did, nevertheless, go on to win on penalties.

Sometimes it works the other way round. I remember one season (I can’t remember which but it was a few years back) when my team Yeovil maintained a strong league position but our home form was woeful. We were nigh on unbeatable away from home. As a young hockey player myself I used to perform better away from home. I think I felt under more pressure at home, but it was somehow lifted when we travelled.

It’s clear from the examples above that any benefit you do gain from home advantage (pitch conditions, support, familiarity) is great, but you’ve got to ensure you are at least competitive away from home otherwise home advantage will be too little, too late.

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