JAMES COVENTRY Footballistics: How the data analysis revolution is uncovering footy’s hidden truths; PETER NEWLINDS with DAVID BREWSTER Around the Grounds: Magic moments from the life of a sports broadcaster. Reviewed by Bernard Whimpress
Sport can be examined from many angles. The first of these books takes a single sport and the second a single life as its subject.
I might be the worst person to review Footballistics since I decry the over-quantification of the game. If I’m allowed to wear prejudice on my sleeve when a defender takes possession of the ball and kicks it 20 metres backwards or sideways to a team-mate, I frequently yell, ‘Got a stat, mate?’ The remark is certainly not meant as praise for either kicker or recipient.
However, I was drawn to Footballistics because of the high quality of primary author James Coventry’s previous research on the history of tactics in his 2015 book, Time and Space. In this new work Coventry and his co-authors (described on the cover as ‘a team of footy’s sharpest thinkers’) begin by analysing goal shooting – the area of the game where there is most room for improvement – before going on to discuss the probability of scoring goals from different positions, ‘score involvements’, where a player is part of a chain of play that results in a score; win probabilities; momentum; results of games home and away; the draft; player trading; shared experience; bias in selecting both Brownlow Medallists and inductees into the AFL Hall of Fame; team ratings; fans and finances.
Myths (and coaching clichés) are busted along the way, including the need to win the contest, mid-field battles and the demand for consistency. A string of banalities from Alastair Clarkson press conferences makes a fun list, as does the point that no coach would be satisfied with consistent mediocrity.
Football watchers are now familiar with terms like forward 50s, defensive 50s, attacking mid-fields and defensive mid-fields, but there are numerous others that will be foreign to them – ‘false forwards’, ‘score links’, an equation that defines ‘contested possessions’ as ‘hard ball gets + loose ball gets + gathers from a hit-out + contested marks + contested marks + contested knock-ons + frees for’, and particularly ‘Player Approximate Value’ (PAV), which is the sum of separate ratings for a player’s attacking, midfield and defensive prowess.
Has the game gone mad? No, but wait for it. The statistic most closely associated with victory for a team is ‘the kick count’. The number crunchers tell us that ‘the team that had the highest (or equal highest) number of kicks in a match won almost 78% of the time’. Perhaps the fans on the few remaining mounds at top venues are not so crazy when they chorus, ‘KICK THE BLOODY BALL!’
Without doubt Footballistics provides keys to understanding modern football. For those writing or commentating on the sport and those guiding the fortunes of top-level clubs, it provides new ways of thinking and the potential for enriching discussion on football’s present and future. However, it also leaves a number of questions unanswered.
The term ‘closed skill’ is used just once, referring to a set shot for goal, but then discussion strays off-target with talk of players being ‘in the zone’ or in a state of ‘flow’, which are essentially unrelated. A ‘closed skill’ in sport is one where the athlete is in control of his or her action, with other examples being all aspects of golf, the tennis serve, and set shots for goal in netball and basketball. Port Adelaide coach Ken Hinkley excused his leading forward Charlie Dixon after he missed two easy shots for goal in the dying moments of the 2017 AFL Elimination Final on the grounds of ‘pressure’, but top professional sportspeople perform under pressure. In the case of footballers it’s what they are paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to do.
There’s analysis galore in 220 tables and graphs (many of them complex) but we’d be better off if there were fewer numbers and more conclusions drawn from them. Dr Kevin Ball, a private kicking consultant (egad!), defends the accuracy of goal shooting from set shots in the AFL, compared to rugby, in clumsy language by saying ‘they don’t have the ball drop and they’re kicking with a place kick, so they’ve got clarity around where the ball is when they impact it’. Solution: bring back the place kick. More players run further, kick goals and goal-kicking accuracy suffers as a result of fatigue. Solution: reintroduce players who kick straight and roam less. Five pages is spent discussing the Leigh Matthews Theory which states: ‘If we were more goals in front than there were minutes to go, we’d probably win.’ You don’t have to be Albert Einstein to work that out. Or even Leigh Matthews!
I read the first 100 pages of Footballistics while sitting in my car with one eye on a South Australian league match between South Adelaide and West Adelaide at Noarlunga Oval and took great delight weighing the odds of conversion when players were shooting at goals. There was pleasure when a West player booted a 50-metre goal from a 45-degree angle with a severe cross wind and when a South forward threaded another goal from deep in a forward pocket. I dropped in for the last quarter of the Sturt–Norwood league game at Unley Oval a week later and saw Norwood, trailing by four goals, kick 13.1 (without the assistance of any breeze) to a single behind in the final term. It might have been a statistical outlier but once momentum was built it was certainly maintained.
It’s hard to gauge who Footballistics is written for. While some of the maths can be absorbing, and there’s no questioning the depth of research, its principle audience is probably the football wonks. Whether it gathers wide sales in the general football market remains to be seen.
Around the Grounds is a straightforward narrative of the life of sports broadcaster Peter Newlinds. Because he served most of his ABC career of nearly 20 years in Hobart it might seem a story easily dismissed by mainlanders. However, Newlinds (in company with co-author David Brewster) has put together an engrossing tale from his beginnings doing school work experience in the old scoreboard on the Hill at the Sydney Cricket Ground to coverage of a wide variety of sports such as rugby league, Australian Rules football, soccer, cricket, the Sydney–Hobart Yacht Race, tennis and the Commonwealth Games.
Newlinds might have missed out on the plums as a commentator – Test cricket, AFL finals, the Olympic Games – but he made the most of the opportunities that came his way. More importantly, however, he relates how his life experience prepared him for the challenges he was about to face as a broadcaster:
… when I was at work [at the SCG] I was getting paid to watch the cricket, while doing a job that was, in social standing, a good few rungs above those most other teenagers got to do. It was also important: a job in which every moment mattered – not just the memorable ones – as did attention to detail and accuracy.
One senses that cricket is Newlinds’ first love but he applies his attention to detail and accuracy whatever sport he covers. As a schoolboy he is caught up in the Sydney world of rugby league and this knowledge and background are put to use in a tumultuous first year at the ABC in 1997 when the Australian Rugby League and Super League are running rival competitions. In his youth he had also followed the old Victorian Football League telecasts and so was at least in part prepared for the idiosyncrasies of Tasmanian football on his relocation there in 1999. In the 1970s he followed English football via telecasts of Match of the Day and travelling overseas in 1986 became (briefly) a Newcastle supporter without realising the perils that playing Chelsea at Stamford Bridge might entail:
After a fairly grim 1-1 draw, we Newcastle fans were locked in our ‘cage’ where we had to stay for another half an hour or so while the Chelsea fans cleared the stands. When the coast was clear, we were basically herded by the police – some mounted, some with dogs – along the streets to the nearest tube station. It was a highly controlled environment and definitely a new feeling to be shepherded along a suburban street as a potential menace to society.
A radio sports commentator has to make vivid pictures for his or her audience and Newlinds brings to life the environments he experienced and especially the character of the grounds of the Tasmanian State Football League or, as it was known, the Chickenfeed SuperLeague. Discussing the commentary position at New Norfolk, home of the legendary full-forward Peter Hudson, he notes:
From our perch in this box we had a view across the river to the centre of New Norfolk, the town dotted with autumnal colours early in the season. On crisp, still winter days there would be a surreal pall of smoke in the air as spectators huddled around fires in 44-gallon drums spread around the periphery of the ground.
Naturally, for a book by a sporting commentator, it is important to learn about the craft and Newlinds offers plenty in this respect with percipient comments on what he calls ‘gears’. Most of the time a commentator will operate in second or third gear but sense the moment to switch up to fourth and fifth gears when the occasion demands it.
In addition to gears there are the sounds of silence. Newlinds explains that calling tennis on the radio is one of the most challenging tasks:
Even the silence before a serve adds to the narrative. All these effects are so dramatic in their own right … that if you give them the space to come through in your commentary they can explain as much as the commentary itself, or more.
Around the Grounds encapsulates the author’s experience of working among the best people in his profession – Tim Lane, Jim Maxwell and Peter Roebuck among them – and he admires Englishman Martin Tyler for his ability to ‘pause in commentary to give the audience the space they need to interpret what they can see’. It is a life not merely well lived but well examined.
James Coventry Footballistics ABC Books 2018 PB 384pp $34.99
Peter Newlinds with David Brewster Around the Grounds Finch Publishing 2018 PB 256pp $32.99
Bernard Whimpress is a historian who usually writes on sport. His most recent book is Adelaide Sporting Sites.
You can buy Footballistics from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
You can buy Around the Grounds from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW here or you can buy it from Booktopia here.
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