Accuracy

This is a reading, not a record

Nobody sanctioned this. It is not produced by, checked by or connected to a union, a competition organiser, a broadcaster or World Rugby. Where an official timeline and this one disagree, the official one is the record and this one is wrong until shown otherwise.

What is true of it is smaller and is ours: it is derived independently from the broadcast, held against the broadcast's own scoreboard, timed to the second off the on-screen clock, and published with the doubt still attached. A sanctioned timeline cannot say how sure it is, because its authority is the claim. A reading can.

How a moment gets here

The commentary of a match is transcribed automatically. A language model reads the transcript and proposes what happened and when. Separately, the match clock and the scoreline are read off sampled frames of the video, which is what turns “about five minutes in” into a particular second of a particular upload. Every description on the site is then written for the site from the call, rather than quoted from it.

The two accounts are then held against each other. Every score the commentary reports should sit near a movement of the scoreboard, and every movement of the scoreboard should have a moment against it. A commentator says “try” for a try, for a disallowed try, for a recap and for a season tally, and the words do not separate them. The board is not an opinion.

What confidence means

Every moment carries a figure between 0 and 1. It is the model's own stated confidence in its reading of the call, and it is published rather than used as a filter: a moment at 0.55 is on the page saying 0.55, not quietly dropped or quietly promoted.

It is a statement about the reading, not about the match. A low figure usually means the commentary was ambiguous, several things happened at once, or a name was unclear in the audio. It is not a probability that the incident occurred, and it should not be read as one or averaged into anything.

A moment that could not be described says so instead of guessing. Where a player could not be attributed, the field is empty rather than filled with the likeliest name.

What origin means

Every moment says where the reading came from.

model — proposed from the commentary by the automated pass. Most of the index.

hand — written or amended by a person. Some of these are corrections to something the model got wrong. Others are scores the commentary never actually called: the scoreboard shows points going up with nothing said about them, and a person supplies the name and the kind, which is the part a scoreboard cannot state. A moment also carries corrected when a person changed a field on a reading the model proposed.

The reasoning behind every hand edit is written down at the time and kept with the match. It is not published, because those notes quote the commentary verbatim and the commentary is the one thing this site does not carry.

The timeline as a file

Each published match also ships its timeline as a document, at /data/<match-id>.timeline.json, carrying a schema key so that its shape can be depended on. It holds the match card, every moment with its clock, kind, player, team, confidence and origin, the descriptions, and a completeness block stating how many scoreboard movements were found and how many of them the index has a moment for.

It does not carry the commentary, and it does not carry what any analyst said. Where analysts have been read about a match, the channels are named and linked and their words are not reproduced.

Known ways this is wrong

Names are mis-heard. Transcription of live commentary in a full stadium renders players phonetically, and a name the model could not resolve against the team sheet is left off rather than guessed at.

Seconds are approximate. A moment is placed where the call lands, which is after the act; every link starts a few seconds early for that reason. Where a moment was recovered from the scoreboard instead of the call, it sits inside the interval the board was sampled in, which can be half a minute wide.

Absence is not evidence. A match may be missing a moment that happened. The completeness block states what is known to be missing; it cannot state what nobody noticed.

A penalty try is worth seven and this index cannot say so. It has kinds for a try, a conversion, a penalty goal and a drop goal, and a penalty try is recorded as a try, which is valued at five. The broadcast's scoreboard has it right, and the scorelines shown on a timeline are read off that scoreboard rather than added up, so they are right too. Only the total of the moments comes out two points light, and only on a match containing one.

The scoreboard can stop before the match does. The graphic leaves the screen at the final whistle, and points awarded after the hooter can go up after it has gone. Where that happened, the timeline says so and the last scoreline shown is the last one the picture carried.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, write to legal@eightyminutes.com and say which match and which moment. Corrections are made to the index itself and the moment then says hand, so a changed entry is legible as changed rather than silently replaced.