Does winning the brawl automatically help you to win the match?

There was a moment during Scotland’s match against South Africa, as tempers frayed and testosterone flowed, that harked back to rugby union’s bygone era. Damian de Allende pinned an elbow to Ben White’s head. Darcy Graham and Cheslin Kolbe grabbed each other’s necks. The big men came steaming in. And while what the Daily Record called a “furious World Cup rammy” soon fizzled out, it reflected a basic tenet of collision sports: win the physical battle, win the match.

Some players, though, believe this goes further still. And that when a fight breaks out on the pitch, winning it can change the momentum of a match. Perhaps even a series. Famously in the second Test of the Lions’ tour in 1989, Robert Jones stood on Nick Farr-Jones’s foot while the Australian was putting the ball into the scrum, sparking a brawl that the Lions “won”. Having been hammered 30-12 in the first Test, they went on to take the second 19-12 and then – a week later – the decider 19-18.

“From that moment on I genuinely believe that the Test series was won,” the Lions star Finlay Calder said, when reminiscing over the match dubbed the Battle of Ballymore. “They just looked at us and thought: ‘I don’t fancy this lot.’” Farr-Jones agreed: “It’s one of the biggest regrets of my career – that we didn’t win the series – and it all started there.”

Instinctively, it makes sense, doesn’t it? When a team “win” a fight, they will feel more dominant and aggressive. Perhaps their testosterone levels will rise – and they will then get a boost on the field of play, too. This is what experts call psychological momentum, and it has its supporters far beyond rugby.

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The ice hockey enforcer Rob Ray perhaps described it best: “Momentum is an amazing thing, and when your team has it, you are unstoppable. Your team-mates are like a sponge when there is a fight. When you win, they absorb that confidence and emotion; and when you lose, they just sink down a notch or two.”

For decades experts have argued over the “hot hand” in basketball, where a player makes shot after successful shot, and whether it truly exists or we are seeing patterns in randomness. This latest twist is more like the “clenched fist” theory. Yet, once more, scientists are on the case.

To test whether winning a fight did help a team, Dr Nadav Goldschmied, an associate professor of psychology at the University of San Diego, and his colleague Michael Apostol trawled four seasons of National Hockey League data and found 1,200 matches that contained one brawl. That then allowed them to scrutinise three “momentum” hypotheses. First, what happens when a fight occurs when the match is tied? Second, what happened when a team went behind early in a game, and then won a fight? And third, if winning a fight in the first period then led to that team scoring next.

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You might reasonably ask how the winners of every punch-up were judged. Here the academics were helped by the inestimable services of hockeyfights.com, an online community dedicated to the “appreciation, analysis and discussion of hockey fights”. And also by dropyourgloves.com, which collects objective NHL brawl data, including the number of punches landed in each fight, and even the number of “big” punches delivered.

After considerable mathematical wizardry, the results were published in Psychology of Sport & Exercise. And they were unequivocal. “The results contradicted our hypothesis that doing well in a fight when the score was tied or behind would catapult the team to victory,” the authors wrote. And, of the 299 dust-ups they studied that took place in the first period, “fight performance once again did not predict a momentum boost”.

Yet the idea of psychological momentum in physical sports is not entirely KO’d. Another detailed study has found that in judo there is indeed evidence that momentum comes from winning a contest, based on a study of all international bronze medal matches between 2009 and 2013. Such fights are unique as they involve one judoka who lost in the semi-finals, having won their quarter-final. And another, who lost in the quarter-finals, but who then won their repechage contest. Generally, the semi-final loser is considered the superior performer, because their loss occurred at a later stage of the competition. Yet the academics found the judokas who had won their repechage emerged victorious in 69 per cent of the bronze medal fights, thus – they argued – showing the benefits of psychological momentum.

There was, however, a significant kicker. These results applied only to men, which the academics believe is down to the effect of testosterone levels on performance. As they write: “The literature has convincingly shown that while higher testosterone levels enhance performance of both men and women, it commonly increases following victory and decreases following loss only among men.”

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So why is there such a difference between ice hockey and judo? Possibly because in a team sport the impact of one brawl will never stimulate every player in quite the way winning a judo contest might. Meanwhile Goldschmied noted that despite the emphatic findings in his research, a “vigorous and persistent belief” that winning a fight swings momentum lingers – with NHL enforcers keen to promote such a narrative, as it preserves their special status.

Yet, as he acknowledges, there is a more compelling explanation. As humans we are drawn to cause-and-effect relationships. We also desire plausible reasons for how matches are won and lost. We play detective. We reverse engineer. Sometimes, though, the story we tell ourselves isn’t correct.