To bring you the best of the sporting weekend, we’ve dug into our bespoke social media analytics platform, Pitch Social Insight, to provide a more social view of sport’s talking points. Here’s what we found:
Aussies on top offline and on
On Saturday, the eyes of the rugby world were fixed on the Rugby League World Cup final at Old Trafford, where the favourites, Australia, put on a masterclass to brush aside New Zealand.
This dominant performance was reflected in social media conversation, where New Zealand failed to appear in the top 10 #RLWC2013 phrases of the day, whilst ‘Aussies’ was the second most used, after ‘Old Trafford’.
Angry Andre spikes the anger
Sunday was a football feast, with four matches being shown across BT Sport and Sky Sports. The early KO was arguably the pick of the bunch, with Spurs hosting Manchester United. Under-fire Spurs manager, Andre Villas Boas was a key topic of conversation throughout the day but there were two significant peaks in anger towards him at 11am and 10pm. These peaks coincided with the Spurs team announcement and Match of the Day.
The shock of the day was at Hull’s KC Stadium where a row over ‘Tigers’ created an electric atmosphere for Hull to inflict a 3-1 defeat upon favourites Liverpool. One player that was unusually quiet, was Liverpool striker Luis Suarez.
Suarez slips out of the limelight
Used to creating headlines, Suarez played little part in the game and this was mirrored online with a 47% drop in mentions to his Twitter account compared with the Merseyside Derby the previous week.
However, the quiet performance didn’t allow Suarez to escape the wrath of fans who also posted nearly 20% more angry Tweets in his direction than the preceding Saturday.
Finally, in Formula 1 the news that Pastor Maldonado was to make the switch from Williams to Lotus for next season hardly sparked jubilation, as the average excitement expressed by F1 fans hit just 30%.
Check back next week for more Pitch Social Insights.
