Assessment of the equality of men's handball matches at the Tokyo 2020 according to the relationship between result and playing time

Abstract

Aim: To discriminate the matches according to their equality level in match status and to analyze the offensive performance of winners and losers for the groups obtained. Method: From the official statistics of the competition, 4783 finishing actions were obtained in the 38 matches of the men's tournament. The clustering of time series was carried out with the “dynamic time warping” algorithm. Results: From the cluster analysis, four types of matches were considered: very balanced (n=8) 21%, balanced (n=12) 32%, poorly balanced (n=16) 42% and unbalanced (n=2) 5%. In the first two types, no significant differences were found in the effectiveness of the attack between winners and losers, contrary to what happened in poorly balanced matches (p<0.01). In poorly balanced matches, there were differences in the number of goals between winners and losers at the beginning of the match, 1'-5 '(p<0.01); while in balanced matches it was between minutes 41 'and 50' (p<0.05). Conclusions: It was found that few matches presented balanced results throughout the playing time and there were very few alternations on the scoreboard in the final moments.