Strategy 2016 Tacs Trailer

[Janus]

No it wasnt a joke. I am curious to see what their answer is and I reckon you may have asked for more than I might have asked for so thats why I suggested you write the email. I think it was Prowess but It might have been Footywire had a subscription to the public for about $80, which was better than what you get free now but didnt have things such as heat maps etc. D_One had a subscription 4 or 5 years ago and showed me their features.

I really want the stats that they come up with from time to time on the Match Day site - scores from intercepts, scores from defense, meters gained etc. That shows you how well the defense is working. The heat maps are interesting after the fact, though.

 

[Macca19]

Prowess were great. I had their subscription for about 6 years. Such a shame they got shunted out of the market

 

[Janus]

"Know your enemy." - Sun Tzu

Here's something that might be a lot more relevant to our game this week - the breakdown of Sydney vs GWS. You might get a better understanding about why I think we're going to kick their collective behinds.

1st quarter

Let's look at how Sydney started the game:



The Swans played a midfield zone, pushing towards the flank, most likely to isolate their defenders from having to run the ball deep out of defence (which they suck at). Because of the slightly more aggressive nature of a midfield zone, which is pretty much a neutral defence compared to the defensive slingshot and the aggressive counter-press, this is what happened to GWS:



Hemmed into their defensive 50, the Giants found it notoriously difficult to move the ball effectively, and only scored 2 points for the quarter. This was the Swans best period for the game, but unfortunately for them they aren't setup with running endurance defenders to exploit his for an entire match.

2nd quarter



Longmire attempts to get more aggressive, moving into a deep lying press in order to push the advantage in the second. But it backfires, because like I said, Sydney just doesn't have the players necessary to play this style for any great length of time. It is curious that he tried this though - like as if they are practicing this defence whenever they get the chance...



This enabled GWS to employ a slingshot counter-attack strategy, just like all the loser teams who won't amount to anything in finals play. It got them back in the game when the reality is they could have and should have been held to a much lower score. Notice too how the Giants set up to move the ball away from where the Swans setup their defence - this is the main reason why a successful press is almost always centralised on the field, regardless of whether the opposition overloads one wing or the other. The lack of leg speed in the Swans team was the reason that they couldn't do this.

3rd quarter



Now this looks familiar After halftime, Longmire gets his players to spread more, still focusing on the counter-press. But it's still not centralised enough, so while the scoring rate slows down for the Giants, they still manage to create 3 scoring opportunities to 6.



They do this by again using a counter-attack, looking to exploit weaknesses in the Sydney press. But unlike the second quarter, where they out scored the Swans 4.2 to 3.1, they couldn't attack through the corridor thanks to the Sydney defenders sliding to cover better, and their scoring rate slowed dramatically.

4th quarter



The last quarter, Sydney overloads the centre, reverting back to a compact midfield zone, knowing that GWS can't afford not to attack due to being behind. The most important aspect was to deny the corridor, but also to save legs that were fatiguing.



GWS, on the other hand, are forced into a situation where they have to make the play. This is where counter-attack falls down - it only works against an opponent that a) pushes up to cause turnovers and b) doesn't have the leg speed and structural shape to cover entries out the back.

It was in this last quarter that Sydney exploited the Giants through their need to go for it and their fatigue. We will be able to do exactly the same, but much better - so long as we keep to our structures and keep improving every match.

 

[Port85]

So are the teams that play counter-attack doing so because they don't know what you (and now us) know about the counter-press?

Or are they sticking to a game-plan that they have the cattle for and hoping for the best (i.e. the counter-press teams fail in execution)?

 

[Janus]

So are the teams that play counter-attack doing so because they don't know what you (and now us) know about the counter-press?

Or are they sticking to a game-plan that they have the cattle for and hoping for the best (i.e. the counter-press teams fail in execution)?

I'm not some savant that knows anything more than an AFL coach. Quite a lot less, in fact. All of them would know exactly what Hinkley is trying to do and the perils of both a counter-attack and a counter-press.

It's more that they have decided to go with what suits their list than anything else. Not many teams have the running capacity across the board the Port Adelaide has. For example, Phil Walsh pushed Adelaide toward the counter-attack because he could see what was coming and you only really need some outside runners to make it work effectively. So they got in guys like Seedsman, kept Smith in the backlines as running back that pushes forward and created a decent defensive structure.

The teams that are committed to counter-press at all costs (like Port and Collingwood) will fail until they learn the structure and how to react to certain situations, but then they will become difficult for a counter-attack team to score heavily against due to the pressure on the ball carrier after a turnover. Counter-attack really relies on the aggression generated by the attacking team to catch them out of position. If the defence is still setup out the back, making it difficult to move the ball...it falls down.

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

I will stick this here for now because its a thread about tactics an how using stuff from other sports can be used in Aussie Rules - but not in this case can you do a carbon copy. On Saturday's Weekend Oz they had a great article from fellow Murdoch paper The Wall Street Journal about the rise of the Golden State Warriors since the new owners came on board in 2010. The went from cellar dwellers to winning the NBA last year, being the best offensive team, no one got close, and a couple of nights ago they won their 72nd game in the season to go to a 72-9 record v Jordan's 1995-96 Bulls record season at 72-10. Edit Golden State Warriors beat the Memphis Grizzlies this arvo (Thursday 14th) and have finished the season 73-9 to beat the Bulls record.

How Golden State Warriors stepped outside the arc to change game

• BEN COHEN THE WALL STREET JOURNAL APRIL 9, 2016

On every NBA court, about 7.3m from the basket, there is a thin stripe of coloured paint. The flat-sided semi-circle it forms is the boundary between shots that count for two points and shots that are worth three. When the NBA added the lines in 1979, the players weren’t sure what to think. They sniffed and pawed at them like cats with a new toy. Only three per cent of the shots they put up that season were three-pointers.

Over the next three decades, that number crept higher. When it reached 22 per cent, the growth curve flattened. It seemed that the sport had found its optimal ratio. Then the Golden State Warriors came along and blew that assumption to pieces. The Warriors, the National Basketball Association’s defending champions, stand three wins from equalling the league record of 72 in the regular season, set in 1996 by Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Much of the credit belongs to star guard Stephen Curry, who is having, by almost every measure, one of the best seasons of any player in history.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/bus...e/news-story/e14cf241f354a54d25a51422237f3194

Silicon Valley takes over and analysing the data commences - producing a result is a style no one has yet figured out how to defeat.

But there is another tale to be told about the Warriors. It involves a group of executives with limited experience, led by a Silicon Valley financier, who bought a floundering franchise in 2010 and set out to fix it by raising a single question: What would happen if you built a basketball team by ignoring every orthodoxy of building a basketball team? The process took many twists and turns, and there were times when it nearly failed. But the dominance the Warriors have displayed this season can be traced back to one of the most unusual ideas embraced by the data-loving executives: the notion that the NBA’s three-point line was a market inefficiency hiding in plain sight.

This season the Warriors have sunk 1025 three-pointers, by far the most in NBA history. Not only has Curry taken more threes than any other player, he is making them at a rate of 45.6 per cent, higher than the NBA average for all shots. He has shattered his own record for most three-pointers in a season by 34 per cent. Moreover, distance seems to have no significant effect on his accuracy. Curry is a better shooter from 9-12m than the average NBA player is from 1-2m.

The result is a style no one has yet figured out how to defeat

.
Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers are the biggest Venture Capital firm in Silicon Valley - have been for 40 years, so anyone from there was going to tinker.

“What’s really interesting is sometimes in venture capital and doing start-ups the whole world can be wrong,” said the team’s primary owner, Joe Lacob, a longtime partner at Silicon Valley venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. “No one really executed a game plan — a team-building architecture — around the three-pointer.”

In 2010, the Golden State Warriors hadn’t won an NBA title since 1975. They played in a dumpy arena beside an interstate and had made the playoffs just once in the last 15 years. The previous owner, Chris Cohan, was loathed by many loyal fans.

Still, competition to buy the team was fierce. To fend off the other finalist, Oracle Corp founder Larry Ellison, Lacob and entertainment mogul Peter Guber paid $US450 million ($597m), which was, at the time, the highest price for a team in NBA history.

The data analysis

It wasn’t long before Lacob, who is 60 years old, installed a basketball brains trust akin to a board at one of his companies. The team’s executives are always communicating — a group text message hums on their phones during games — and every decision brings vigorous debate. But from the beginning, the Warriors brass placed an unusually strong emphasis on numbers.

The data dive yielded many insights, but the Warriors eventually zeroed in on the three-point line. NBA players made roughly the same percentage of shots from 7m as they did from 7.3m. But because the three-point line ran between them, the values of those two shots were radically different. Shot attempts from 7m had an average value of 0.76 points, while 7.3m shots were worth 1.09.

This, the Warriors concluded, was an opportunity. By moving back just a few centimetres before shooting, a basketball player could improve his rate of return by 43 per cent.

Lacob wasn’t the only team owner in sports to delve into statistics — baseball has been doing it for years — and the Warriors weren’t the first NBA team to see the potential of the three-pointer. Starting in the 1990s, a string of teams with brutally effective defences had prompted teams like the Phoenix Suns and San Antonio Spurs to search for different ways to score, and that meant shooting more three-pointers. More recently, as the data improved, it became clear that teams weren’t taking nearly enough of them.

The difference between the Warriors and everyone else was what the team decided to do with this information.

For many years after James Naismith invented basketball in 1891, the prevailing view was that the most important area of the court was near the basket. From Wilt Chamberlain’s finger-rolls in the 1960s to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s sky hooks in the 1970s to Jordan’s soaring dunks in the 1990s, the NBA was the dominion of players who owned the rim.

But once the analysis was done - how do you fit it around the players you have and who do you go and recruit?

When the Warriors, under their previous owners, drafted Curry in 2009, he wasn’t a prototypical NBA superstar. Though his father, Dell, had played in the NBA, Stephen Curry was so lightly recruited out of high school that he had attended tiny Davidson College near his hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina. He only emerged as a tantalising NBA prospect after his team made an improbable run to the regional finals of the 2008 NCAA tournament.

Even after his first two seasons with Golden State, Curry wasn’t a sure thing. Still, as the team’s new executives settled on their plan to exploit the three-point line, they became convinced Curry would be their centrepiece.

The first test of their commitment came in the form of a controversial decision: trading the team’s leading scorer, Monta Ellis. Some believed Ellis was too similar to Curry and that he was costing him shots. Others thought it was crazy to banish the most popular player. At one point, just before the deal, Lacob tested the confidence of his basketball executives by telling them he was getting cold feet. They defended their plan and pulled the trigger.

The week after the 2012 trade, Lacob was booed by fans. The team finished that season with one of the NBA’s worst records. The Warriors already were building a team around Curry that would allow him to take more three-pointers. The most critical step had come in the 2011 draft when they selected guard Klay Thompson. He, too, was the son of an NBA player and an excellent shooter. At 200cm (6ft 7in) , he was 10cm taller than Curry.

The team believed Thompson’s shooting ability would make defences too frightened to leave him alone, and that would limit their ability to double-team Curry. But because he was tall, he could defend the other team’s best guard and shoot over defences without being blocked, which could help the Warriors compete against teams that hoped to use their size to contain Curry.

What made the move most attractive was its novelty. Most three-point-shooting teams had one superb shooter surrounded by a collection of supporting players. “Imagine if we could have two of those guys,” Kirk Lacob, the owner’s 27-year-old son and the team’s assistant general manager, recalled thinking at the time. “It’s once in a lifetime,” said Joe Lacob.

The day after Ellis was traded, Thompson was inserted into the starting line-up. After that, according to the general manager Bob Myers, when the team was drafting and signing players, the strategy shifted from wondering whether they could play with Curry to asking: “Who can play with Steph and Klay?”

But as they built the team from the analysis the tech milionaires reckon they have to sack the coach to find one that can take advantage of their game plan and get the players to implement it - ie a guy who shot a lot of 3 pointers.

By the time the 2014-15 season began, the Warriors had padded their roster with Australian Andrew Bogut, a 213cm (7ft) centre who protects the rim and shores up their defence; the position-defying Draymond Green, the steal of the 2012 draft; and rangy guards Andre Iguodala and Shaun Livingston, whom they acquired in free agency. “They complemented shooting, even though they’re not shooters,” Myers said.

The Warriors then had a chance to trade for one of the league’s premier players, Minnesota Timberwolves forward Kevin Love. The move would have been a no-brainer for most basketball people. But the Timberwolves wanted a player in return whose departure would have scuttled the Warriors’ master plan. “They kept asking for Klay, and we kept saying no,” Lacob said. “We weren’t going to trade Klay, and they weren’t going to do a deal without Klay.”

The team doubled down on its three-point plan by replacing coach Mark Jackson with Steve Kerr, a member of five NBA championship teams who had retired with a 45.4 per cent shooting rate on three-pointers, the highest in league history. It was his first NBA coaching job.

And they keep recruiting and playing 3 point shooters

That season, with all the pieces in place, the Warriors fielded five players between 190cm and 203cm who all were threats to shoot three-pointers. This “small-ball” line-up — widely known as the “death line-up” or, as Barack Obama called it, the “nuclear line-up” — helped the Warriors take 9 per cent more three-pointers as a team than the year before and make a higher percentage than anyone in the league.

This combination of frequency and efficiency had a fascinating effect on opponents. It forced them to spread out, extending their defence all the way to the three-point line instead of packing the paint, leaving the Warriors with lots of open space. Curry set a record for three-point shots and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Thompson made the All-Star team. The Warriors overcame the Cleveland Cavaliers to win their first NBA title in 40 years.

But the Silicon Valley boys and new coach kept tinkering.

The tinkering could have stopped there. The Warriors clearly had hit on a winning formula. But then they began thinking about an audacious idea that would make them even better.

The plan had started to take shape in 2013, during a playoff game against the Spurs, one of the NBA’s top teams. Curry was just then coming into his own, showing signs that he could be both dazzling and deadly. During one possession early in the first quarter, Curry dribbled around a screen and found himself in a pocket of open space. Immediately, even before he had time to set his feet, Curry pulled up and fired a three-pointer.

Myers, the general manager who was in the arena watching that night, couldn’t believe his eyes. As the ball swished through the net, he turned to the other Warriors executives around him to confirm what he had just seen. “Did he just shoot that off one foot?” he asked. “Who shoots a three off one foot?”

And just like Rinus Michels found Cruyff to carry out Total Football, the Warriors found Steph Curry

The shot was only one of dozens of stunners Curry had made during his young NBA career. But it played a crucial role in firming up another idea the team was batting around. The Warriors were dreaming about what would happen if they gave Curry a green light to take more shots, and more crazy ones, too — not off one foot, exactly, but from places on the floor where nobody had ever routinely taken shots.

Curry had already reached the point where he could take as many as 10 threes in one game without anyone noticing. It didn’t matter if the shot was off one foot, from 1.5m behind the three-point line or the popcorn stand in the concourse. His accuracy didn’t seem to suffer much. Before every game, in fact, Curry practices these kinds of bombs by shooting from the half-court logo.

The team realised that any possession that ended with a three-point attempt by Curry was worthwhile — and that they would never discourage him from taking one. In this, the season of Curry’s unleashing, the Warriors are shooting 17 per cent more threes than a season ago. Curry is attempting more than 11 a game. No NBA team had ever had a player attempt more than nine. Last season he hit 286 threes. This season he is on pace for about 400.

What amazes fans even more is the location of those shots. NBA players shoot an average of 28 per cent from 8m or beyond. Most players don’t even take them unless the shot clock is running out. Curry has taken 253 such deep shots this year and made 47 per cent of them. The result is that defenders have strayed even farther from the basket to guard him, opening even bigger spaces for his teammates.

“Stretching a defence makes it easier to score,” Myers said.

The success of the Warriors this season has turned Curry, 28, into one the NBA’s biggest stars. He has an everyman appeal because he isn’t a giant.

His celebrity has raised the profile of the three-point shot. This year, like the last four years, NBA teams are taking more three-pointers than ever. They now amount to 28.3 per cent of total shots. College teams also hit another high in three-pointers attempted per game this season. High school teams have caught the bug, too.

The owners know other teams will try and find a way to stop them and beat them, but they know it wont be overnight

Guber, the team’s co-owner, said other NBA teams will try to emulate the Warriors’ original approach as they attempt to end the team’s reign. “Other teams will do it in a different way,” he said. “They’ll take chances and challenge the incumbent and come up with another way to create the magic.”

For now, the Warriors have it. They turned the three-point line into a boundary in time. The kind of strategy that unfolded inside the line belonged to the game’s past. The future of basketball, they believed, lay behind the line — and Curry showed it was farther behind that line than even they imagined.

“I don’t know why it took so long,” Lacob said. “You would think in sports that this would’ve been tried a long time ago.”

 

[Janus]

I got a reply from CD, RussellEbertHandball

This what we want...I shudder to think how much it would be...

Enhanced Package

1. Game information
• Game ID
• Game name
• Date and Time
• Venue
• Crowd
• Umpires

2. Scoring Statistics (Player)
• Goal
• Behinds
• Quarter Scores

3. General Play Statistics (Player)
• Kicks
• Handballs
• Efficiency (%)
• Marks (o Contested Mark)
• Disposals
• Contested Possession
• Uncontested Possession
• Clearances
• Clangers
• Frees for (o Defensive 50 o Mid o Forward 50)
• Frees against
• Tackles
• Goal assists
• Score involvement
• Hit outs (To Advantage %)
• Inside 50
• Metres Gained

4. General Play Statistics (Team)
• Time in Possession
• Metres Gained
• Frees for (o Defensive 50 o Mid o Forward 50)
• Forward 50 (o Marks Inside 50 o Tackles Inside 50 o % Goal Once Inside 50)
• Time in Front (o Minutes o Percentage)
• Biggest Lead
• Interchanges
• Score Sources (o Stoppages o Turnovers o Kick-ins)

5. Additional Live Feeds
• Goal Maps
• Supply of matchups

You can ask for a customized package though...so what stats would we really need? Maybe just the General Play Statistics (Team)?

 

[RussellEbertHandball]

3 and 4 would be good if reasonably priced, otherwise 3 will have to do the job I guess.Does efficiency percentage include kicking or just total disposals?

 

[charcolechaddy]

You two are crazy!

 

[Janus]

"Who told you to think?! I don't give you enough information to think! You do what you're told...that's what you do." - Total Recall

Someone said in the GWS thread that I was confident we would beat Adelaide in Round 2 as well. And it's true, I was. So it's kind of stuck in my craw a bit why we failed in that game. Was it the press? A complete failure of the system, to the point where we need to chuck it out and start again? Or was it something else? The answer is going to surprise you.

1st Quarter



By now you've probably noticed something that is blindingly obvious to even the most stupid: that we didn't play a press. Or rather, that we weren't set up correctly to even make a guesstimate of a press. Instead, the heat map for the team in the first quarter shows that we played tried playing counter-attack against Adelaide, with some sort of crappy 'tap' (the softest version of a press I've seen) down the same wing every time. Was this a directive from the coaching box? When Hamish Hartlett says that no-one setup in their correct positions and that the wingers didn't push back like they were supposed to at any stage of the game, I doubt it. In fact, this quarter is eerily similar to first quarter of the Sydney/GWS game that I looked at earlier today. So no, this wasn't a coaching directive. This was the players thinking they knew better than the coaches. 40 points to 8 in the first quarter proves that they were wrong.


For Adelaide, us playing a sloppy, halfhearted press but really trying to play a counter-attack that only focused on one wing (if it was focused at all) was like Christmas. It stretched out our shape, making it easy to pick holes in it, and the lack of spread meant that it was easily defended against. If you want to know why we didn't score much in this quarter, we were definitely our own worst enemy.

2nd Quarter


In the second quarter, Hinkley read them the riot act. Gone was any attempt to play a counter-attacking style, because we're not playing that rubbish anymore. Instead, it was replaced with the press that we had executed so well in the second half against St.Kilda - except, we didn't execute it well at all. Pushing way too far into the Adelaide forward line, which left a group of defenders isolated in the middle of the ground, Adelaide actually found it easier to score against us this quarter. Because the only thing worse than a poorly executed counter-attack is a poorly executed counter-press.


With all the play focused in the same area, it was too easy for the Crows to whip the ball behind and score from only minimal time in their forward half. Not because of any fantastic strategy by them, but because we simply didn't setup correctly. What is interesting to note is that while in the first quarter we played counter-attack and only had 3 scoring shots to Adelaide's 10, in the second quarter we 9 to Adelaide's 8. So if anyone says that the counter-attack is better...kick them in the balls. It's not better - it's just different, and against a proper counter-press, it's actually worse. If only we could kick straight...

3rd Quarter


It's obvious that the instructions at half time were that we were pushing too high up into our attacking 50 with the press. So what was the natural response? To retreat back entirely, allowing Adelaide to exploit the space in their defensive 50 to setup sorties through the exposed flank. I'll keep saying it until I'm blue in the face - against a counter-attacking side, it's vitally important that any press is centralized so that the shape has maximum effectiveness.


Pyke's mantra of 'playing what's in front of you' held Adelaide in good stead in this situation. Since we had dropped into what was close to a midfield zone (even though we were still meant to be 'pressing'), the solution was to spread out the counter-attacking play and press up, pushing the advantage the Crows had on both the scoreboard and general play. If you look at both maps together you can almost see the Port Adelaide forwards retreating back to help in defense instead of being proactive in the counter-press and trying to create turnovers.

Still, 8 scoring shots to 7 in this quarter. Even a half-baked defensive counter-press works reasonably well against the best counter-attack.

4th Quarter



Finally, finally, the boys got it right (sort of). And this corresponded to the best part of the game for us both in scoring and in defense, holding the Crows to 3.5 (8 scoring shots, but shots that weren't 'over the back' goals, hence the poorer conversion rate) to 4.8 (12 scoring shots). But the reality is that this quarter was only ever about actually going out and trying to stick to the gameplan - a gameplan that would have worked well had the players trusted in it and not done their own thing in the first quarter.



Since Adelaide had an unassailable lead, Pyke could afford to overload the center corridor, knowing that the only way Port was ever going to challenge was if they could take the most direct route to goal through a dominance of center clearances.

There's no point discussing this game further - it quite literally was a ****up right from the word go. But those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I never want to see this kind of performance again. Nor do I want people to ask about going back to the sling shot. It doesn't work consistently enough and relies on the sort of turnovers, missed scoring shots and bad play that we exhibited in this game.

Before I go, an interesting fact - in both the second and fourth quarters, when we played the press, we generated repeat scoring attempts (3 in a row each time) due to locking the ball inside 50.

 

[Arintaraj]

You know you spend too much time on BigFooty when you dreamt in detail that another poster disproved Janus' analysis by posting photos showing where the teams gathered for their on-field huddle during the quarter time breaks – apparently that was skewing all the heat maps, making them meaningless. You remember that feeling of hope being dashed because you thought Janus was really on to something and we were about to really dominate the competition.

"Who told you to think?! I don't give you enough information to think! You do what you're told...that's what you do." - Total Recall

Someone said in the GWS thread that I was confident we would beat Adelaide in Round 2 as well. And it's true, I was. So it's kind of stuck in my craw a bit why we failed in that game. Was it the press? A complete failure of the system, to the point where we need to chuck it out and start again? Or was it something else? The answer is going to surprise you.

1st Quarter

View attachment 235319

By now you've probably noticed something that is blindingly obvious to even the most stupid: that we didn't play a press. Or rather, that we weren't set up correctly to even make a guesstimate of a press. Instead, the heat map for the team in the first quarter shows that we played tried playing counter-attack against Adelaide, with some sort of crappy 'tap' (the softest version of a press I've seen) down the same wing every time. Was this a directive from the coaching box? When Hamish Hartlett says that no-one setup in their correct positions and that the wingers didn't push back like they were supposed to at any stage of the game, I doubt it. In fact, this quarter is eerily similar to first quarter of the Sydney/GWS game that I looked at earlier today. So no, this wasn't a coaching directive. This was the players thinking they knew better than the coaches. 40 points to 8 in the first quarter proves that they were wrong.

View attachment 235321
For Adelaide, us playing a sloppy, halfhearted press but really trying to play a counter-attack that only focused on one wing (if it was focused at all) was like Christmas. It stretched out our shape, making it easy to pick holes in it, and the lack of spread meant that it was easily defended against. If you want to know why we didn't score much in this quarter, we were definitely our own worst enemy.

2nd Quarter

View attachment 235324
In the second quarter, Hinkley read them the riot act. Gone was any attempt to play a counter-attacking style, because we're not playing that rubbish anymore. Instead, it was replaced with the press that we had executed so well in the second half against St.Kilda - except, we didn't execute it well at all. Pushing way too far into the Adelaide forward line, which left a group of defenders isolated in the middle of the ground, Adelaide actually found it easier to score against us this quarter. Because the only thing worse than a poorly executed counter-attack is a poorly executed counter-press.

View attachment 235326
With all the play focused in the same area, it was too easy for the Crows to whip the ball behind and score from only minimal time in their forward half. Not because of any fantastic strategy by them, but because we simply didn't setup correctly. What is interesting to note is that while in the first quarter we played counter-attack and only had 3 scoring shots to Adelaide's 10, in the second quarter we 9 to Adelaide's 8. So if anyone says that the counter-attack is better...kick them in the balls. It's not better - it's just different, and against a proper counter-press, it's actually worse. If only we could kick straight...

3rd Quarter

View attachment 235331
It's obvious that the instructions at half time were that we were pushing too high up into our attacking 50 with the press. So what was the natural response? To retreat back entirely, allowing Adelaide to exploit the space in their defensive 50 to setup sorties through the exposed flank. I'll keep saying it until I'm blue in the face - against a counter-attacking side, it's vitally important that any press is centralized so that the shape has maximum effectiveness.

View attachment 235334
Pyke's mantra of 'playing what's in front of you' held Adelaide in good stead in this situation. Since we had dropped into what was close to a midfield zone (even though we were still meant to be 'pressing'), the solution was to spread out the counter-attacking play and press up, pushing the advantage the Crows had on both the scoreboard and general play. If you look at both maps together you can almost see the Port Adelaide forwards retreating back to help in defense instead of being proactive in the counter-press and trying to create turnovers.

Still, 8 scoring shots to 7 in this quarter. Even a half-baked defensive counter-press works reasonably well against the best counter-attack.

4th Quarter

View attachment 235338

Finally, finally, the boys got it right (sort of). And this corresponded to the best part of the game for us both in scoring and in defense, holding the Crows to 3.5 (8 scoring shots, but shots that weren't 'over the back' goals, hence the poorer conversion rate) to 4.8 (12 scoring shots). But the reality is that this quarter was only ever about actually going out and trying to stick to the gameplan - a gameplan that would have worked well had the players trusted in it and not done their own thing in the first quarter.

View attachment 235342

Since Adelaide had an unassailable lead, Pyke could afford to overload the center corridor, knowing that the only way Port was ever going to challenge was if they could take the most direct route to goal through a dominance of center clearances.

There's no point discussing this game further - it quite literally was a ****up right from the word go. But those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and I never want to see this kind of performance again. Nor do I want people to ask about going back to the sling shot. It doesn't work consistently enough and relies on the sort of turnovers. missed scoring shots and bad play that we exhibited in this game.

Before I go, an interesting fact - in both the second and fourth quarters, when we played the press, we generated repeat scoring attempts (3 in a row each time) due to locking the ball inside 50.

 

[PepeSilvia]

You know you spend too much time on BigFooty when you dreamt in detail that another poster disproved Janus' analysis by posting photos showing where the teams gathered for their on-field huddle during the quarter time breaks – apparently that was skewing all the heat maps, making them meaningless. You remember that feeling of hope being dashed because you thought Janus was really on to something and we were about to really dominate the competition.

That's genuinely hilarious.

 

[Janus]

I'll just leave these here. I'm sure you'll be able to work it out by now.

 

[Andre]

I'll just leave these here. I'm sure you'll be able to work it out by now.

It's just a jump to the left. Then a step to the right.

 

[Macca19]

I got a reply from CD, RussellEbertHandball

This what we want...I shudder to think how much it would be...

Enhanced Package

1. Game information
• Game ID
• Game name
• Date and Time
• Venue
• Crowd
• Umpires

2. Scoring Statistics (Player)
• Goal
• Behinds
• Quarter Scores

3. General Play Statistics (Player)
• Kicks
• Handballs
• Efficiency (%)
• Marks (o Contested Mark)
• Disposals
• Contested Possession
• Uncontested Possession
• Clearances
• Clangers
• Frees for (o Defensive 50 o Mid o Forward 50)
• Frees against
• Tackles
• Goal assists
• Score involvement
• Hit outs (To Advantage %)
• Inside 50
• Metres Gained

4. General Play Statistics (Team)
• Time in Possession
• Metres Gained
• Frees for (o Defensive 50 o Mid o Forward 50)
• Forward 50 (o Marks Inside 50 o Tackles Inside 50 o % Goal Once Inside 50)
• Time in Front (o Minutes o Percentage)
• Biggest Lead
• Interchanges
• Score Sources (o Stoppages o Turnovers o Kick-ins)

5. Additional Live Feeds
• Goal Maps
• Supply of matchups

You can ask for a customized package though...so what stats would we really need? Maybe just the General Play Statistics (Team)?

1, 2 & 3 are readily available on afl tables, footywire, dream stats, footy live. Or am I missing something?

4 would be good.

 

[Janus]

In case some missed the correlation - the West Coast Eagles play exactly the same way we want to play. They have just been doing it for longer...since last year. It took them til around R6 when they played us last year to get it right, which is why Simpson said it was the 'best win he's ever been a part of'. We are trying to replicate the same defensive style that they use because it's an adaptive defensive scheme and it allows extreme offense while keeping a strong defensive setup.

The reason why the heat map looks like it's focused on one particular spot with the Eagles is because that's where Richmond kept moving the ball the most - but if you also notice, the there is still yellow movement of the defense shifting that covers the entire ground (unlike when we played the Crows when there were wide swathes of untouched green). That's what happens when you finally get the counter-press working - sides will pick a route that they feel is the weakest and attack it, knowing that they can't go down the corridor. The Tigers tried both wings in the first quarter, and West Coast repelled them either side.

That's why Hinkley said in his press conference that you can't judge a side until Rounds 6,7,8 - until you see the teams that are focusing on this new defensive scheme bed it down, because it's one thing to train it, but it's quite another to actually play it. Eventually you'll see us coming out with a heatmap that looks exactly like West Coast's in the first quarter against a counter attacking side like Richmond and not the garbage we served up against Adelaide. If you look at our second quarter against the Crows and West Coast's second quarter against Richmond you'll see exactly what I mean.

I'm not sure exactly what it will look like against another counter-press side. Guess we'll find out when we play the Eagles.

 

[OneGreatClub]

In case some missed the correlation - the West Coast Eagles play exactly the same way we want to play. They have just been doing it for longer...since last year. It took them til around R6 when they played us last year to get it right, which is why Simpson said it was the 'best win he's ever been a part of'. We are trying to replicate the same defensive style that they use because it's an adaptive defensive scheme and it allows extreme offense while keeping a strong defensive setup.

The reason why the heat map looks like it's focused on one particular spot with the Eagles is because that's where Richmond kept moving the ball the most - but if you also notice, the there is still yellow movement of the defense shifting that covers the entire ground (unlike when we played the Crows when there were wide swathes of untouched green). That's what happens when you finally get the counter-press working - sides will pick a route that they feel is the weakest and attack it, knowing that they can't go down the corridor. The Tigers tried both wings in the first quarter, and West Coast repelled them either side.

That's why Hinkley said in his press conference that you can't judge a side until Rounds 6,7,8 - until you see the teams that are focusing on this new defensive scheme bed it down, because it's one thing to train it, but it's quite another to actually play it. Eventually you'll see us coming out with a heatmap that looks exactly like West Coast's in the first quarter against a counter attacking side like Richmond and not the garbage we served up against Adelaide. If you look at our second quarter against the Crows and West Coast's second quarter against Richmond you'll see exactly what I mean.

I'm not sure exactly what it will look like against another counter-press side. Guess we'll find out when we play the Eagles.

I will have to look at the maps to try to understand properly but didn't Crows tactics work just as well against Richmond? Isn't it just that Richmond are poor and horribly injured at the moment? If Crows are playing slingshot like we did two years ago and it is working well then why did we need to change? If we were so easily 'found out' why aren't the Crows found out? Also why hasn't Pyke trained the Crows to do the West Coast press (or web from last year?) and why did West Coast lose so badly to Hawks again? Apologies and I thoroughly enjoy your posts but I am a slow learner where these game plan tactics and heat maps are concerned. Thanks.

 

[Janus]

I will have to look at the maps to try to understand properly but didn't Crows tactics work just as well against Richmond? Isn't it just that Richmond are poor and horribly injured at the moment? If Crows are playing slingshot like we did two years ago and it is working well then why did we need to change? If we were so easily 'found out' why aren't the Crows found out? Also why hasn't Pyke trained the Crows to do the West Coast press (or web from last year?) and why did West Coast lose so badly to Hawks again? Apologies and I thoroughly enjoy your posts but I am a slow learner where these game plan tactics and heat maps are concerned. Thanks.

You're right about Richmond being poor, but here's the difference:

1st quarter - Adelaide 4.4 (8 scoring shots) to Richmond 2.3 (5 scoring shots)
2nd quarter - Adelaide 7.2 (9 scoring shots) to Richmond 5.2 (7 scoring shots)
3rd quarter - Adelaide 6.3 (9 scoring shots) to Richmond 2.5 (7 scoring shots)
4th quarter - Adelaide 2.5 (7 scoring shots) to Richmond 4.4 (8 scoring shots)

1st quarter - West Coast 6.8 (14 scoring shots) to Richmond 2.0 (2 scoring shots)
2nd quarter - West Coast 4.5 (9 scoring shots) to Richmond 1.1 (2 scoring shots)
3rd quarter - West Coast 3.3 (6 scoring shots) to Richmond 3.2 (5 scoring shots)
4th quarter - West Coast 5.1 (6 scoring shots) to Richmond 3.0 (3 scoring shots)

So no, the Adelaide tactics didn't work as well. They were, and always will be, defensively poor because Adelaide allows too many inside 50 entries due to the counter-attack style. West Coast conceded only 27 inside 50 entries against Richmond but generated 60 themselves. Conversely, Adelaide allowed 53 entries while generating 57.

That's the difference. The Adelaide style appears to work well now, but it's too kamikaze to be effective. Which is ironic, because you would think that attacking is actually more dangerous. But it's not. In fact, do you want to know Richmond's best period of the game against West Coast (the third quarter) looked like? It was when they started attacking the press instead of waiting for the press to come to them:

And incidentally...this is West Coast's heat map for the game:

 

[Peck]

Janus looking at the heat maps from yesterday it looks like we tried to sit back against GWS. Perhaps the players were afraid of GWS's incredible pace, and felt like if they sat back they would be able to deal with it.

I'm definitely grasping for understanding here, as it's not easy to tell the difference between a coaching direction and players losing it. I would have thought this is a huge error from the players, perhaps due to a lack of belief in the system.

I reckon you can see as soon as they lose control of a game they look lost.

Maybe Hinkley needs to say "I will live or die by this game plan, if you want me to stay as coach you need to put all your belief behind me, this plan will work."

That or the coaches gave up on the plan during the game which would be about as bad.

 

[Janus]

Janus looking at the heat maps from yesterday it looks like we tried to sit back against GWS. Perhaps the players were afraid of GWS's incredible pace, and felt like if they sat back they would be able to deal with it.

I'm definitely grasping for understanding here, as it's not easy to tell the difference between a coaching direction and players losing it. I would have thought this is a huge error from the players, perhaps due to a lack of belief in the system.

I reckon you can see as soon as they lose control of a game they look lost.

Maybe Hinkley needs to say "I will live or die by this game plan, if you want me to stay as coach you need to put all your belief behind me, this plan will work."

That or the coaches gave up on the plan during the game which would be about as bad.

You need to look at GWS and their heatmap too. We didn't sit back...we were forced back. Because they were dominating the clearances in the centre, there was no time for us to push forward. But worse than that, we were so worried about their pace that our defenders never pushed up for long enough to create intercepts. 9 intercept marks from only 27 intercepts in the game. That's horrible.

What the players needed to do was stop creating implied pressure around the contest and start creating real pressure the way that Sydney and Adelaide did on Saturday night. We started off great this year against St Kilda with 106 tackles but then have regressed badly in this area because our forward line isn't dropping back to help. Neade 2 tackles. Wingard 1. Young 1. Amon 1. Dixon 0. Westhoff 0.

We didn't want to grind and make it a contest. We just rolled over and gave up. You can talk about structure as much as you like, but that wasn't structure. That was effort, and that is unforgivable.

 

[Far Kern]

You need to look at GWS and their heatmap too. We didn't sit back...we were forced back. Because they were dominating the clearances in the centre, there was no time for us to push forward. But worse than that, we were so worried about their pace that our defenders never pushed up for long enough to create intercepts. 9 intercept marks from only 27 intercepts in the game. That's horrible.

What the players needed to do was stop creating implied pressure around the contest and start creating real pressure the way that Sydney and Adelaide did on Saturday night. We started off great this year against St Kilda with 106 tackles but then have regressed badly in this area because our forward line isn't dropping back to help. Neade 2 tackles. Wingard 1. Young 1. Amon 1. Dixon 0. Westhoff 0.

We didn't want to grind and make it a contest. We just rolled over and gave up. You can talk about structure as much as you like, but that wasn't structure. That was effort, and that is unforgivable.

Really good analysis.

Effort, and if you check back through the game day thread heaps of posters here picked it up at the 5 minute mark.

 

[Peck]

You need to look at GWS and their heatmap too. We didn't sit back...we were forced back. Because they were dominating the clearances in the centre, there was no time for us to push forward. But worse than that, we were so worried about their pace that our defenders never pushed up for long enough to create intercepts. 9 intercept marks from only 27 intercepts in the game. That's horrible.

What the players needed to do was stop creating implied pressure around the contest and start creating real pressure the way that Sydney and Adelaide did on Saturday night. We started off great this year against St Kilda with 106 tackles but then have regressed badly in this area because our forward line isn't dropping back to help. Neade 2 tackles. Wingard 1. Young 1. Amon 1. Dixon 0. Westhoff 0.

We didn't want to grind and make it a contest. We just rolled over and gave up. You can talk about structure as much as you like, but that wasn't structure. That was effort, and that is unforgivable.

I absolutely agree.

It certainly feels to me as though players were too afraid to push up, and as you said didn't apply pressure to the ball carrier.

You could easily see our players couldn't ever chase a GWS player down once they got past, so the natural reaction would be to sit back.

My feeling is that mindset was throughout every part of our game from centre clearences to attacks inside 50. I'm just trying to work out where it started from.

 

[Macca_1870]

Are you able to post the heatmaps, Janus?

 

[Janus]

I absolutely agree.

It certainly feels to me as though players were too afraid to push up, and as you said didn't apply pressure to the ball carrier.

You could easily see our players couldn't ever chase a GWS player down once they got past, so the natural reaction would be to sit back.

My feeling is that mindset was throughout every part of our game from centre clearences to attacks inside 50. I'm just trying to work out where it started from.

From the forwards. Specifically, the small forwards. Let's put it this way - Dixon, playing like dog shit, generated 7 pressure acts and laid 0 tackles. Since that's not really his role, you can understand that. Amon? 8 pressure acts, 1 tackle. Young? 10 pressure acts, 1 tackle. Wingard? 11 pressure acts, 1 tackle. Neade? 13 pressure acts, 2 tackles. Compare this to Boak - who everyone says is playing shit: 26 pressure acts, 6 tackles. Ebert: 20 pressure acts, 4 tackles. Hartlett: 22 pressure acts, 6 tackles.

Not one of the tackles made by our forwards was laid inside 50. You know what that means? It means that these ****s were clogging space in the midfield when they created this pressure, but they were too concerned about getting out the back of their opponent to actually create a real contest.

When Jake Neade is your best defensive small forward, you're going to have a bad time.

I ****ing said Young is a defensive liability, and if he retains his spot in the side we're going to keep failing because his attitude is to attack first and not defend...which spreads to the rest of the small forwards because they think "if I'm going to do all this hard work and this **** is going to continually push forward to get a cheap goal from it, what's the point?"

Yeah, he scored goals - in two games we got absolutely flogged in and a scratch match against Essendon. Whoop-dee-do. He needs to pull his finger out and realize there's more to football than just scoring.

Amon is even worse - the worst front runner I've seen. Doesn't get involved in shit unless he's going to be on the end of a chain. As for Wingard - I'm prepared to cut him slack because he shouldn't have to do the heavy lifting coming back from a hamstring. Not next week though,

Get rid of Young, Neade and Amon and replace them with Snelling, Colquhoun and Palmer. We don't carry defensive passengers on this team.

 

[KenOath]

In case some missed the correlation - the West Coast Eagles play exactly the same way we want to play. They have just been doing it for longer...since last year. It took them til around R6 when they played us last year to get it right, which is why Simpson said it was the 'best win he's ever been a part of'. We are trying to replicate the same defensive style that they use because it's an adaptive defensive scheme and it allows extreme offense while keeping a strong defensive setup.

The reason why the heat map looks like it's focused on one particular spot with the Eagles is because that's where Richmond kept moving the ball the most - but if you also notice, the there is still yellow movement of the defense shifting that covers the entire ground (unlike when we played the Crows when there were wide swathes of untouched green). That's what happens when you finally get the counter-press working - sides will pick a route that they feel is the weakest and attack it, knowing that they can't go down the corridor. The Tigers tried both wings in the first quarter, and West Coast repelled them either side.

That's why Hinkley said in his press conference that you can't judge a side until Rounds 6,7,8 - until you see the teams that are focusing on this new defensive scheme bed it down, because it's one thing to train it, but it's quite another to actually play it. Eventually you'll see us coming out with a heatmap that looks exactly like West Coast's in the first quarter against a counter attacking side like Richmond and not the garbage we served up against Adelaide. If you look at our second quarter against the Crows and West Coast's second quarter against Richmond you'll see exactly what I mean.

I'm not sure exactly what it will look like against another counter-press side. Guess we'll find out when we play the Eagles.

This may very well be true...but I haven't seen anything in any of our games that even remotely resembles West Coast's 'web'. If we are going for this style we are coming from a very, very long way back!

We are also an extremely poor clearance side, which means we are unable to get the ball forward to actually set up like this. I just feel that we are trying to implement a plan that doesn't suit our list and relies too heavily on things we just aren't good at. I'm of the view that our game just needed a few tweaks, not a complete overhaul.

I love the optimism and hope you're right, but I just haven't seen anything across the first four rounds that makes me think we can turn this around anytime soon.