It’s not a numbers game

Not for the first time, we at AussieRulesBlog find ourselves out of step with conventional wisdom.

 

Commentators, professional and otherwise, seem content to award  BOGs and other recognitions to the players garnering the most statistics, seemingly despite blemishes or stats-building passages where two or three players ‘wax’ for up to a dozen touches without achieving anything other than eating up time.

 

The recently-departed (and unlamented by us) Joel Bowden seemed to regularly feature in lists of best players although his major contribution was playing the role of sweeper and changing the side his team was attacking to. Nevertheless, having racked up his thirty possessions, Joel would duly be named among the Tigers’ best.

 

We wonder whether this situation follows from the popularity of assorted fantasy football competitions. For the uninitiated, if there are any such, mathematical algorithms allocate a numerical value to a player’s performance in a game based on numbers of possessions, goals, goal assists, and so on. Even media broadcasts are now replete with references to the top fantasy football points scoring players in a match.

 

Fantasy football is all well and good — if you like that sort of thing — but football is about more than just numbers. Perversely, this is exemplified by forwards who have only six kicks, but kick six goals.

 

As a consequence of the fantasy football boom, the football public are being overloaded with statistics and anyone is free to draw whatever conclusion they like from them. We are moved to recall British PM Benjamin Disraeli’s aphorism that there are three types of lies: lies; damned lies; and statistics. This was never more the case than when raw statistics have an unsophisticated analysis applied.

 

Already clubs are getting increasingly more sophisticated statistics supplied to them, and these are slowly leaking into the public consciousness.

 

An excellent example of a more sophisticated statistical analysis concerns hitouts. Once upon a time, it was sufficient to know that your ruckmen were getting their hands to the ball at ruck contests. Where the ruckman was John Nicholls or Polly Farmer, there was a very good chance that the deflected ball finished with your team’s rover.

 

As teams search for advantage, hitouts is morphing into Hitouts to advantage. In other words, it’s no longer enough to simply know that the ruckman is leaping high enough to touch the ball. Teams now want to know what he’s doing with it once he touches it.

 

Increasingly, crude statistics like possessions, kicks and marks will fall by the wayside as teams seek to better analyse how effectively their players use the ball once they have possession.

 

We can only hope that media pundits begin to use these more sophisticated analyses and that the general public learns the difference between ‘best on ground’ and ‘most possessions’ — but we won’t hang by our thumbs waiting.