I read with great interest a recent article by Tierney et al.1 entitled “Does player time-in-game affect tackle technique in elite level rugby union?" which was published in Journal of Science and Medicine Sport, Issue 2. In this study, the authors aimed to investigate changes in ball carrier or tackler proficiency features. Their cohort study was performed on athletes who started and remained on the field throughout the entire game. As stated in the methods section and abstract of the article, they used one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) with Tukey post hoc testing for comparison of tackle counts between quarters in one game. Because they evaluated the number of tackles of the same players during quarters of the game, their comparison of number of tackles between quarters of the game is completely dependent.2–4 One-way ANOVA is a test to determine significant difference between two or more independent groups.5–7 Therefore, based on the result of assessment of normal distribution of number of tackles, the authors must use repeated measures ANOVA or the Friedman test.8–10 In addition, to compare the differences in number of tackles between each two quarters of the game, the authors can use Wilcoxon signed rank test or paired t-test...
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", language="en", issn="1440-2440", doi="10.1016/j.jsams.2018.01.016", url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jsams.2018.01.016" }