AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Round 3 2022

The Joy of Six

… And it took only one more week for the AFLW fixture to be thrown into more semi-chaos by COVID, meaning that the scheduled Brisbane v Gold Coast cross-state match I highlighted last week did not eventuate…

Instead, the Lions played host to Carlton on a Tuesday night and won easily by about six goals. This catapulted them up off the bottom of the ladder and into the top six, and possibly set this year’s finalists for good – i.e. they’re looking like the same six teams that made the finals last year. With the caveat that the Western Bulldogs have still only played one match so far, the top six are already looking a clear step ahead of the rest on most of the major statistics (see table below).

Fremantle and Melbourne in particular are both looking very strong in several areas. Both have average differentials with their opponents so far of around 30 points, eight scoring shots, ten contested possessions, and over nine inside 50s per game. Adelaide – while on top of the ladder – has generally not been quite as strong in these areas, and holds top spot largely through keeping scoring low. They have however played tougher opponents.

Collingwood – not yet defeated but not yet convincing?

You could argue perhaps Collingwood are a step further back again, as they have only broken about even in the inside 50 battle. Their defence has been more of a reason for their healthy percentage, ranking second behind the Crows for opposition points per inside 50.

However, they still have the highest uncontested possession differential to date, suggesting that they have still had the majority of ball control in their matches, even if not control of the territory. We should get a better read on where the Magpies are at when they (hopefully) host the Dockers tomorrow night.

AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Round 2 2022

And it took only two rounds for the AFLW fixture to be thrown into semi-chaos by COVID … with one match (Brisbane v Bulldogs) being postponed, and other matches moved.

That aside, we probably didn’t learn a whole lot more from the results this weekend – or at least we mainly learned that the hierarchy of teams from last season looks like being similar to the hierarchy of teams this season. Melbourne accounted for last week’s big winners Richmond as predicted, although aside from the second quarter the Tigers did actually stick fairly well with the Demons. Last year’s top teams Fremantle, Adelaide, and Collingwood all won as well by reasonably comfortable margins.

Row, Row, Row

Perhaps the biggest development came at the other end of the ‘rankings’, with Gold Coast beating West Coast, and indicating they may be a little stronger than the Eagles, or at least closed the gap. It was the Suns’ first win in 672 days, so their ceiling does still looks to be ‘not last’.

Credit where it’s due however with Gold Coast recording 11 scoring shots and 30 inside 50s, well above their averages of six scoring shots and 22 inside 50s last season. The number one draft pick Charlie Rowbottom played like an established star with 17 disposals (3^rd most in match) and 12 tackles (equal first for the weekend).

It sets up a slightly intriguing (scheduled) clash against cross-state rivals Brisbane, with the reigning premiers coming off a postponed match and still sitting at the bottom of the ladder – the Suns will celebrate even more if they could make them stay there.

AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Round 1 2022

The first round of the 2022 AFLW season passed with little surprise regarding who won – perfect tipping so far, woo-hoo! – although there were a couple of unexpected things within those results.

Lowly ranked Geelong came with eight points of 2021 finalist the Kangaroos, while last year’s premier Brisbane could manage only four scoring shots and currently sit on the bottom of the ladder, albeit against last year’s runner-up the Adelaide Crows. The rankings still have the Lions on top (just), however long-term injuries to defender Kate Lutkins (last year’s best afield in the Grand Final) and forward Dakota Davidson may hurt their fortunes somewhat.

Tigers burning bright?

One of the biggest improvers in terms of the rankings, and probably in the minds of many watchers, was Richmond who opened the season with a 38-point win against St. Kilda.

A note of caution though is that the Tigers were very accurate in front of goal, kicking 10 goals and just one behind, which they may find it hard to sustain. They had only five more inside 50s compared with the Saints, and committed more turnovers, although Monique Conti helped them to easily win the clearance battle.

Last season though the Tigers’ opponents were highly accurate in that they had the most points per scoring shot, so perhaps this is things evening out a bit and showing that the Tigers are around somewhere in the middle.

Getting time and space

Once again this round’s results showed the high value in the AFLW of being able to win uncontested possessions. All the round’s winners went over 100 uncontested possessions, while all the round’s losers bar Brisbane went under that mark. In contrast the spread of contested possessions among winners and losers was more even.

Really, a team’s ideal in Australian football would be to keep possession of the ball and advance it towards goal without running into pressure. My observation would that be in the men’s competition teams use a higher number of uncontested possessions to do this, more often maintaining long chains in which they move the ball laterally or backwards, and racking up more possessions per turnover. While this is done with the ultimate purpose of finding a way out of stoppages or a gap in the opposition defence, this could make the value of any single uncontested possession lower in the men’s game, and which is why winning the contested ball count is more often important.

In the women’s competition at its current juncture though, small differences in winning contested ball may matter less, and it may be more about having the skill and the game plan to be able to maintain possession once you have it.

One could certainly see this, for example, in how Melbourne was able to dominate possession against the Bulldogs on Saturday night, with players like Libby Birch, Tyla Hanks and Lily Mithen able to gather – and in Birch’s case intercept – a lot of possessions with no nearby opponent. Indeed the Demons looked about as impressive as advertised, and while they don’t quite yet sit atop these rankings, I have little argument against the betting market currently having them as (slight) premiership favourites.

AFL WOMEN’S Rankings: Preview 2022

Welcome back to The Wooden Finger’s AFL Rankings for 2022, with the AFL Women’s season scheduled to kick off this Friday.

Not just rankings but more stats

This year I’m adding another table to the usual weekly set. This will be a summary of important statistics for each team for the season, so that you can see at a glance how teams are performing in particular areas. Included in this table for each team will be – both for and against – average points, scoring shots, inside 50s, contested and uncontested possessions, and approximate ‘net possession chains’ defined as intercepts plus clearances less turnovers. These are the statistics I find myself most referring to in seeing where a match was ‘won and lost’, and I hope others find them useful too.

Below is an example, which summarises how each team went during the last AFLW season.

At a quick glance, one can see that there were seven teams that were fairly similar in terms of scoring power last season: Brisbane, Adelaide, Collingwood, Melbourne, Fremantle, the Kangaroos, and Carlton. These seven teams all averaged 12 to 13 scoring shorts and around 40 or more points per game. However, Melbourne, the Kangaroos, and Carlton were a bit more ‘leaky’ on defence, conceding one or two goals more on average per game than the other four sides – although in the Demons’ case that was due more to high opposition accuracy on goal than conceding more scoring shots.

The Bulldogs, GWS, Richmond and St. Kilda formed the top part of the lower part of the league, conceding slightly or somewhat more points than they scored, and having a negative differential with their opponents on most important stats. Finally West Coast, Geelong, and Gold Coast were well off the pace, giving up on average four to six goal margins to their opponents.

Analysing the fixture for 2022 (though it is probably futile…)

For what it’s worth, let’s have a look at how teams fared in terms of the difficulty of their fixtures for 2022. I say ‘for what it’s worth’ because as we know the fixtures of both the men’s and women’s AFL competitions have changed from week to week over the past two pandemic-affected seasons, and we have already had a reshuffle of the Round 1 fixtures just a week before games are scheduled to start. Nevertheless, we can at least see what the AFL is trying to do in determining this year’s fixture.

In a competition with 14 teams but only ten rounds, each team will miss out on playing a few of the others. The AFL has taken a similar approach to what they did in the later rounds of last season, which is to have the lower-ranked teams face off more against each other than the higher-ranked teams and vice versa.

The expected lower sides mentioned above – Richmond, Geelong, Gold Coast, St. Kilda, and West Coast – will all play each other. The main problem for these teams in terms of the ease of their fixtures is that they do not get to play themselves.

Similarly, most of the top sides get to only play two or three of the lower-ranked sides. One exception is Collingwood, who only misses out on playing Richmond. Somewhat amazingly though, the reigning premiers Brisbane get to play all of them! At this stage then, the Lions look to be one of the big ‘winners’ from this year’s AFLW fixture. Runners-up Adelaide, and Carlton – who actually ended up missing the finals last year – look to be the biggest ‘losers’, playing only two of the lower-ranked teams.

Well, time to get ready for the first bounce (hopefully) on Friday. First round tips below:

AFL Statistics Series #6: Who Loses The Ball?

In this post on AFL statistics, I am going to focus on losing possession of the ball.

When in AFL matches turnovers are mentioned, I expect the image that comes to mind for many football fans is a player kicking the ball straight to the opposition, pretty much the type of action the term ‘clanger’ was invented for. As shown in the last post of this series though, the majority of disposals that lead to turnovers are not what are considered ‘clangers’; more often they are just ‘ineffective’ disposals, and about as often they are actually what are considered ‘effective’ kicks. At the same time, clangers are surely a considerable part of turning the ball over. Here I’ll take a closer look at how significant they are.

Clangers by themselves are fairly good at predicting how many turnovers a player will have (see chart below). One main difference between clangers and turnovers is that free kicks against a player are counted as clangers. Free kicks against though will to some extent not result in turnovers, either because the opposition is already in possession of the ball or because the free kick against has happened in a stoppage – particularly for rucks and inside midfielders. Hence in predicting turnovers we may want to differentiate between free kicks against and other ‘non-free kick’ clangers.

Turnovers and non-free kick clangers have a slightly tighter relationship (see chart below). If I am using a regression to estimate turnovers, one that separates out free kick and non-free kick clangers looks like it will give a more appropriate estimate of the relative importance of these things in predicting a player’s turnovers. But given many turnovers are not clangers let’s look a little further.

I might be able to do better using ‘disposal efficiency’. Ultimately though, one of my main intentions in this series to build up to a system of player value over the past twenty years or so, and there is not a long history of that statistic. So I am going to look at just raw disposal counts instead.

Average turnovers per game and simply average kicks also have a strong relationship across players (see chart below). A few players like Shannon Hurn, who are phenomenal in their kicking accuracy, will lie outside the trend, but in general kicks look like they will help to explain some of the variation in turnovers that clangers by themselves do not.

Handballs will too, but to a lesser extent – your team is more likely to keep possession through handballs than by kicking the ball. I haven’t shown it here, but there is a positive relationship between average handballs per game and average turnovers across players. Again there are some outliers from the general trend – rebounding defenders will tend to have more turnovers per handball, and rucks and midfielders will tend to have less, but there is something to be gained in predicting turnovers by throwing them in.

Putting all of these things together – non-free kick clangers, kicks, free kicks against, and handballs – we get a pretty good estimation of a player’s average turnovers per game (see chart below).

Ultimately, using kicks and handballs implicitly assumes that every player is as good as each other in retaining possession. It’s the clangers – in part also standing in here for disposal efficiency – that add the information about a player’s (in)ability to keep possession.

Though even just concentrating on the player in possession may give a somewhat incomplete picture of who is responsible for the turnover. Since many turnover happen in contests, perhaps some of the ‘blame’ should also go to the player that was on the intended receiving end of the disposal. Still, this should give something to work with in terms of attributing responsibility for the end of a team’s attack.

AFL Rankings: Finals 2021

Melbourne have barraged their way through the AFL finals series to claim a long-awaited premiership.

After a long wait of 57 years, Melbourne have finally won their thirteenth premiership in the VFL/AFL. They did it by beating the Western Bulldogs in the Grand Final, by 74 points, in Perth… which seems a somewhat appropriate result in a season where things shifted so quickly and frequently that my tips were often out of date about as soon as I posted them. This followed big wins by the Demons over Geelong by 83 points and Brisbane by about five goals, to complete the most devastating run by a team through the finals series since at least Richmond had their own drought-breaking premiership in 2017. As a result, while they started the finals series among a group of four to six teams that all looked fairly even up the top, they have ended the season on my rankings with a clear break of about three goals over the second-ranked side.

Playing their best against the best

In a way, Melbourne’s domination of the finals is consistent with their form throughout the season, where they were fantastic against other teams in the top eight. The Demons ended up winning 11 matches and losing only two against other finals sides, better than their record of nine wins out of 12 matches – which included one draw – against non-finals teams. Overall their average net margin was about as good against the top sides as against the bottom sides (see tables below). It was a big change from their 2018 finals run, where they demolished lower-ranked sides and struggled against the best. After adjusting for opponent strength though, their performances in those heavyweight matches become even more impressive – and are a large part of why they ultimately ended up ranked as clearly the best team in 2021.

DEE-fence! DEE-fence!

Melbourne ended the 2021 season as not only the premiers and the top team on my rankings, but also as the most improved team on my rankings. In particular, they improved massively in defence. The Demons were stingier than any other team, letting through just 64 points per game and 1.31 points per opposition 50, compared with league averages of 80 points and 1.55 points per opposition 50. In 2020, they were mid-range on these measures, and conceding points when the ball went inside their opposition’s forward 50 was an area of weakness during their 2018 finals run.

This improvement can be seen in the production of their three main backs: Jake Lever – who may have been this season’s best defender – Steven May, and Christian Salem. They didn’t get any more spoils, but they won more contests. All three recorded substantial increases from 2020 in their averages for kicks, marks, contested possessions, intercepts (with Lever leading the league), and rebound 50s, while Lever and May also won more contested marks (see table below).

The Demons overall had by far the highest contested possession and intercept differentials this season. If you’re constantly winning far more ball than your opponents it’s a good bet that you are going to be very hard to stop.

Gawn, Trac, and Clarry get their cup

In the end though, there is little doubt that the driving force behind Melbourne’s success is their star-studded midfield of ruckman and captain Max Gawn, and high draft picks Clayton Oliver and Christian Petracca. Gawn was second for average hit outs per game this season, while Oliver and Petracca were top ten for disposals and top five for contested possessions per game (with Oliver leading the league in the latter).

Petracca’s Grand Final in particular is already the stuff of legend, making him the unanimous choice for the Norm Smith Medal. Trac picked up 39 disposals – with 24 contested possessions – and had 11 inside 50s, nine clearances, an astonishing 15 score involvements, and two goals. All of this too came against a Bulldogs midfield which is one of best in the land. It was a performance right up there with any produced by Dustin Martin, the player who Petracca – somewhat reluctantly – is often compared with.

Is this the start of a new Dee-nasty then? Melbourne this season were one of the best teams, if not the best team, across two-thirds of the ground, and none of their main rivals got close to them in the finals. Still, as Richmond and Geelong found this season the higher up you are the further you have to fall. For now, winning a first flag is almost six decades should provide plenty of satisfaction (and relief) in itself.

AFL Rankings: Round 23 2021

It looks a very close race in this year’s finals series, but I’ve a few bucks on the Brisbane Lions to win the 2021 flag.

It was an exciting finish to the 2021 home-and-away season, with positions changing significantly by the week – and by the minute on the weekend in the final round.

The Brisbane Lions, who were outside the top four over the past month, snuck into fourth in the final minute of their match against the Eagles, giving them a double chance in the finals.

The Western Bulldogs, who were on top of the ladder after Round 20, lost their last three matches to finish fifth, meaning they are now in an elimination final and must win all of their finals.

Port Adelaide finished in second with their two-point win against the Dogs, which is their highest position since Round 2, and earned themselves a home final.

And Melbourne won their first minor premiership in 57 years, which usually means they should not get a home ground disadvantage unless they lose in the first week, but who knows this year?

Premiership favouritism has changed often in recent weeks, and the finals series looks like it will be no different. In the current TAB betting, the top four teams are all at odds of less than $6.00, and Stats Insider has all of the top four teams at a probability of between 20 and 25 per cent. Adding more complexity is that – with state restrictions due to COVID – we don’t even know where teams will play each week if they do win; for example, whether Port Adelaide gets a home preliminary final if they win this week, or which state the Victorian sides would host finals in, or even where the freaking Grand Final is going to be played!

Nevertheless I make picks for the finals every year, and this year will be no exception. Here are my predictions for every match of the 2021 AFL finals series:

Courtesy of AFL.com.au Predictor

So I’m picking the Brisbane Lions, who currently top my rankings, for the premiership, and reflecting my confidence I’ve put a whole three bucks on it. I’ll enjoy my sixteen dollars return – which I will have already spent on another six-pack to get me through lockdown – in the ‘quarter of a chance’ event it comes off.

AFL Rankings: Round 22 2021