#Eagles game play by play radio free

'While the kick down the line is a regular feature of the game, it generates a scoring shot about 10 per cent of the time,' Crowhurst said. Crowhurst has worked out that kick is expected to be retained 30 per cent of the time, but how often will it lead to anything of substance? 'If teams are taking on more difficult kicks, are they biting off more than they can chew?'īut retention alone does not tell the whole story. 'Retention rating normalises the difficulty of kicks and allows us to see which teams are hitting their targets,' Crowhurst said An example involving James Aish from the same match demonstrates the thought process even more clearly. The roost is also almost always not the first choice of kick, or the second or even third.īefore he kicks the ball, Young's eyes dart anywhere but long. That kick we highlighted above - from Young to traffic and eventually Melbourne's hands - is expected to be retained 30 per cent of the time, turned over 25 per cent and results in a contest the remaining 45 per cent of the time. 'By taking an outcome-based approach to kicks, rather than an antiquated definition, we can model how likely a kick is retained by a teammate or ends in a contest,' Crowhurst said.Ĭrowhurst has also worked out the likelihood the kick will end up being contested, and how often it could be directly turned over. To do this, Crowhurst analysed more than 170,000 kicks taken in the past three years, using machine-learning techniques.

#Eagles game play by play radio free

Unfortunately, in modern football, that rule of thumb definition of effectiveness seems to be hiding the true value of many long kicks.Ĭrowhurst has inferred the likely outcomes of kicks given their starting location, target location, and whether the kicks occur in general play or after a free kick or mark. That latter part is an arbitrary line that was added to recognise an old truth, that a long bomb to a contest is good enough. This hits at the tension in the term 'effective kick'.Īs per Champion Data and the AFL, an effective kick is where the ball finds a teammate, or is kicked to a contest at least 40 metres away. Hayden Young sums up the situation from behind the mark, looking for options up the field. Fremantle have the ball hemmed up in the back half of the ground, close to their boundary line. It is a sight you have likely seen hundreds of times before. In the process, he has uncovered some uncomfortable truths about the official 'effective' kick. One data scientist thinks he might have unlocked the next evolution in defining what a good kick might be. One of the main ones is effective - and ineffective - kicks.Ĭommentators each week talk about good players having a lot of effective kicks, with the term believed to align with the better ball users in the game. The information revolution around football has progressed with a fair deal of pace, but many of the terms that we still use now were developed by Hopkins in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

Hopkins surmised that putting more descriptive information around elements of the game might help give us a better understanding. That man was Ted Hopkins, a hero for Carlton in the 1970 grand final and founder of Champion Data. That all changed in the 1990s, with one man deciding that the quality of kicks was worth investigating. But for much of footy's history, they have been treated as such, aside from the totals in the goal and behind columns.Ī kick has been a kick, whether it be a drop, flat or screw punt, stab pass, checkside, banana, torpedo, drop or place kick.