While Ireland beat Australia in the rugby match last weekend handily enough, Irish rugby supporting twitter users were no match for their soccer counterparts.

And those tweeting about the game down under weren’t even at the races over the course of the game.

Two weeks ago, Ireland’s ultimately disappointing Euro 2016 qualifier against the Scots attracted over 21,000 tweets.

However just 13,000 tweets about the rugby match were recorded last weekend, according to a data visualisation put together by The Irish Times in collaboration with a team of researchers from Digital Humanities and Journalism group (HuJo) at the Insight Centre for Data Analytics in NUI Galway.

Tracking the location of the tweets was made possible through a system from the HuJo group at Insight Centre. Around 10,000 of the 13,000 tweets were geo-tagged using this system, while CartoDB software was used for the data visualisation.

The same system was used to track tweets about the soccer match and it showed that both Irish and Scottish fans were equally engaged by the match - at least in an online context.

When it came to the rugby, however only around 10 per cent of the tweets came from down under - unsurprising perhaps given that the match was being played in the middle of their night.

It was a somewhat different story in Ireland where the level of engagement was at its most frenetic as Ireland moved into a 17 point lead early in the first half and then again when the Aussies drew level. There was another Twitter flare-up at the end of the match.

The hashtags used for the tweet collection, some of which were trending during the game were #irevaus, #irlvaus, #irevsaus and #irlvsaus.