After an extended hiatus comes the next article in this pre-season series; a voyage through the tactical depths with disturbing implications that raise questions of the coaching and selection panel.
I’ve come to believe this article is cursed and almost gave up on writing it altogether. Originally much of the content here was to be posted prior to the Elimination Final with the Bulldogs after the team selections were announced under the title Why we will lose – and by 10 Goals. However the curse intervened, I came down with a ‘flu variant not covered by the vaccine during a critical period of restructures at work and had to scramble overtime from home in a viral mess whilst spaced out more than a lab monkey in order to justify my position.
Suffice to say, the article was not posted here, the result is history and I was so furious at the ineptness of our coaching and performance that I didn’t even bother logging in until draft day.
So I started again on this article last week – what a campaigner of a week it has been, the following has occurred:
Cursed.
So anyway, get onto the article already I hear you say:
These violent delights have violent ends.
A Shakespearean insight to capture the tragedy of a 13 year old girl having a relationship with a man likely approaching 20, against family wishes, whereby they both commit suicide. (Yet that is romantic apparently…)
I think it is however a fitting analogue to our current tactical discombobulation (plus I just wanted to add a Westworld reference).
Let’s start with the basics:
Tactics 1.01
I enjoy coaching. Throughout the year I’ll coach from ages 10-18 in aussie rules, soccer and basketball. The first question you ask as a coach is how do you win? The answer of course is simple, score more than the opposition.
From there it follows as a process of how do you score versus how will the opponent prevent you from scoring and conversely how to contain the opponent from scoring and how the opponent will try to score.
I tend to be pretty aggressive in my tactical thinking and to put it very basically, the team with superior offensive capability dictates the tactical terms for a match as it is up to the opponent to change something in order to restrict them from scoring.
Now let’s take that simple line of thought and extrapolate it to the AFL. West Coast is the team with the greatest offensive capability in the competition. For example:
With the above in mind, it is not unreasonable to argue that given an equal amount of forward entries as the opponent (i.e. midfield stalemate) that the Eagles will win a large majority of their matches unless the opponent changes their tactics.
So what changes can an opponent make to counter a decisive attacking team? There are two primary ways:
Under such circumstances, most AFL teams deploy an extra number to the defence (a +1 under the current popular description) as a means of restricting the opposition forwards whilst minimising the negative impact upon their own attack. Indeed, in this post-flooding era, this role is becoming more specialised and is taking on greater significance.
This circumstance however provides the offensively superior team with the opportunity to have a defensive +1 of their own on numerically better terms (6v5 compared to 7v6). Consequently deploying a defensive +1 as a reactive measure may actually make the opposition significantly more difficult to defeat.
I am also of the opinion that McGovern is probably the most influential defensive +1 in the competition right now. On paper, the Eagles are undoubtedly one of the toughest tactical prospects in the league.
Putting it together – Zones and Webs
There is nothing revolutionary about the uptake of zonal marking methodologies that has had such a recent impact upon the AFL. If anything, I am surprised it has taken so long for it to happen. Every other comparable team sport utilises defensive zones tactically with success, it was only a matter of time until someone applied it to AFL. We all know that was Clarkson with the Hawks and now his disciples (Simpson included) are furthering its impact.
What is effective about a zone though?
A disciplined and cohesive zone allows a team to dictate how the opposition will move in order to score. This is a powerful outcome, you can negate the opponent’s main strength or highlight a weakness or make them play to your strength.
So why haven’t we seen zones before? Because they are hard.
Zoning in basketball is fairly simple, your guarding area is generally 3-4m in size and it is pretty straightforward to teach someone where they should be. In the round ball game, the area is larger 5-10m, however the offside rule affords players the knowledge that the opponent can only be on one side of them, making easier to observe and react to their movement. At AFL level players are required to zone areas 15-20m around them, a huge amount of space, without the aid of an offside rule – it’s an extremely difficult tactic to deploy without being cut to shreds by loose players running out the back - just ask Hardwick and Buckley. This is the reason why you won’t see zones in colts or state or AFLW – it takes years of full-time training with the same squad and coaching panel to achieve the discipline and trust that is required to deploy one successfully.
The Eagles under Simpson’s tutelage deploy one of the more effective mobile zones the competition has ever seen, (in)famously dubbed by the media as ‘the Web’. But what actually is it and how does it operate?
The web is a mobile zone that defensively funnels the opposition to move the ball out wide, away from the central corridor and compels them to kick toward a low percentage target (1v2 or 1v3). Additionally, in the outcome of a turnover, the web provides an outstanding avenue to counterattack via quick ball movement through the central corridor.
As you can see the web is actually two zones of five spread equally across the field at both half back and half forward, with a midfield ‘cloud’ starting in the central corridor between them. The back six, arranged in a zone of five plus a sweeper is reminiscent of what defences would probably look like in soccer if the offside rule was not enforced.
You can clearly see how it operates to restrict opposition use of the central corridor and create a defensive environment conducive to aggressive counterattacking from intercept marks.
Untangling the web
So we have the best attack in the competition, an intercept marking specialist who excels as a defensive +1 and a superior tactical approach utilising zones – how do we end up losing games?
It is far too easy to take the herp derp line and blame it all on midfield incompetence.
The web, for all of its merits, is a zone and all zones share one thing: they mark space rather than players. This truth also means zones have an inherent vulnerability: movement. Whether it is screen, screen, pass to free up Curry for three; formation of an overlap for a try; or the false diagonal run across the centre half to allow space for the striker to receive and score; movement (particularly quick movement) destroys zones.
Remember above the second option to contain a superior offensive team – stacking the midfield at the expense of the forwardline. It is here that the seeds of our defeat have been sown.
We’ll play devil’s advocate for a moment, coaching an opposition team against the Eagles.
On first look, things look pretty grim. Nobody is capable of matching Kennedy one-on-one, let alone considering Darling, or Lecras. The web is deployed and McGovern will just intercept all day if allowed to be a +1 whilst their midfield, despite being no better receives first ball from the rucks at the stoppages.
We conduct the following moves:
So now we have a +2 situation to our advantage on both wings, the intercept marking influence of McGovern neutralised, the web brought higher up the ground, creating a paddock out the back and an additional runner at the back of every contest each time they decide to play a ruckman as a forward.
Each time we get the ball it gets fed to the extras on the wing, which then draw the numbers of Eagles massed in the corridor out of position, which then in turn allows runners to be located through the corridor and target the goalward leads running into the space behind the web…
If this sounds familiar, it is precisely what Beveridge and the Bulldogs did against us in the Elimination Final. He knew exactly how we would set up, put a plan into motion and his players executed it perfectly. That they outnumbered us for goal assists by 11 to 1 shows just how easily we were exposed by their running into the space created behind the zone.
We however had set ourselves up for failure before the match even began due to ill-conceived notions that influenced the selections of the match committee.
Slaughtering Sacred Cows
For a moment I was convinced that we would win the flag in 2015. I was converted to this thinking by the performance against the Bulldogs in Round 21 of that season. The Bulldogs had won 8 of their last 9, with the accumulated winning margin of their prior three fixtures approaching 250. Yet we went on to thoroughly trounce them in every aspect of the match, ending up with almost twice the amount of scoring shots and outscoring them in the second half by ten goals.
The epiphany for me in that performance however, was that due to injuries we played without any key defenders in the team and not just survived, but routed one of the best running sides in the competition completely off the park.
The contested possession count was +34 to our advantage. It is the largest deficit the Bulldogs have incurred in that statistic for any match over the last two seasons.
The selection committee didn’t see things the same way however and made changes to bring in key defenders for the trip to Adelaide against the Crows. Unfortunately for us, McGovern was clearly underdone and Barrass not ready; the web couldn’t keep its shape and we were ripped apart by the Crows in one of the most clinical quarters of football you will ever see.
After that, Barrass was sent back to East Perth, Schofield was still injured and we hosted the lowly Saints (who had been belted by the Swans by near 100 the week prior) with McGovern as a lone key defender down back. We were expected to win by 10 goals and did by 15. But it went beyond that – we won the contested possessions by a massive +51 (which is the highest margin that I am aware of for the club in that statistic) and had 21 scorings shots in comparison to just two in the second half.
And there the forced experiment ended. We have never have never gone down this path since.
Half a season later we played the Bulldogs again with our default defensive setup and lost the contested possession count by 39. Three months after that we played them again and lost the count by 23.
I have now come to believe much of our success in 2015 was the product of fortunate accidents which forced the selection committee into playing smaller, more mobile defenders for the majority of the season rather than success by design.
I had high hopes for 2016. Instead our success was ignored and our mistakes not learned from.
We played 21 out of 23 games in 2016 with three key-sized players in defence. In 2015 that number was zero.
We have an unhealthy obsession with tall players. We went into the Elimination Final against the Bulldogs with EIGHT (8!) key sized players in the team (191cm+, 91kg+). The Bulldogs had four (which includes Bontempelli, who is a mutant).
Further to this notion, take a look at what happens when we play differing numbers of key-sized players in our defence:
Amazing. The addition of two key-sized players in defence has a massive impact upon our overall performance.
Look at those statistics. It is evident that with less key players down back, the zone defence operates with greater effectiveness and the team is able to commit more players to the ball.
Yes, I am aware it is a very small sample size to extrapolate from, but the opposition is comparable and it is all the data we have and I believe it remains significant. What is clear however is that we are clearly a worse team when playing three key-sized defenders than when we are playing two.
We get pasted in the midfield, not because of the lack of quality of our primary midfielders. We get beaten due to the lack of rotational options and supporting cast who should be there to ease the burden upon them.
Difficult decisions need to be made.
What is the purpose of deploying a mobile zone if you fill it with immobile players?
It occurs up forward as well. What is the purpose of playing a permanent resting ruckman up forward at the expense of a specialist crumbing forward if you already have two key forwards? How many marks inside forward 50 do our rucks take? Not many. How many times does the ball go to ground inside our forward 50? Certainly far more than the amount of times a ruckman marks it. How many times does the defensive marker of a resting ruckman run off them to spoil the hit-up leads of other forwards or join an attacking move? Again, far more than the amount of times a ruckman marks it. I have a strong distaste for resting ruckmen. When coaching, I refer to them as ‘penguins’ because they can’t /won’t run.
Too many talls. We are strangling ourselves by playing too many talls.
Taking into account our current method of deploying a mobile zone, it is my belief our best performing team would look like this:
These violent delights have violent ends.
I’ll end where I began. We have an exceptional squad. We so easily could have been back to back premiers the last two seasons.
But we will never achieve any success if we don’t change our selection habits.
I’ve come to believe this article is cursed and almost gave up on writing it altogether. Originally much of the content here was to be posted prior to the Elimination Final with the Bulldogs after the team selections were announced under the title Why we will lose – and by 10 Goals. However the curse intervened, I came down with a ‘flu variant not covered by the vaccine during a critical period of restructures at work and had to scramble overtime from home in a viral mess whilst spaced out more than a lab monkey in order to justify my position.
Suffice to say, the article was not posted here, the result is history and I was so furious at the ineptness of our coaching and performance that I didn’t even bother logging in until draft day.
So I started again on this article last week – what a campaigner of a week it has been, the following has occurred:
- A hamstring strain whilst doing repeat sprints.
- A trip to hospital because son had the intelligence to fall off the school fort.
- Whilst at above trip to hospital, one of my staff decided they would show initiative and put out a notice to the board – unfortunately it was scripted so poorly my uncoordinated son could probably have done a better job. So whilst we’re waiting for scans to see if anything is broken, the phone is melting with WTF messages from executives who get paid more in a month than what most get in a year. So I had to go back into the office that evening, get reamed for having an incompetent subordinate that I didn’t hire (who now also has an official warning due to said incompetence) and be informed that my entire department is now under the microscope.
- Then finally come home after that to find the hot water tank has exploded – for real, the bottom third completely separated and blew off in a catastrophic failure. I’m now showering at the gym.
Cursed.
So anyway, get onto the article already I hear you say:
These violent delights have violent ends.
A Shakespearean insight to capture the tragedy of a 13 year old girl having a relationship with a man likely approaching 20, against family wishes, whereby they both commit suicide. (Yet that is romantic apparently…)
I think it is however a fitting analogue to our current tactical discombobulation (plus I just wanted to add a Westworld reference).
Let’s start with the basics:
Tactics 1.01
I enjoy coaching. Throughout the year I’ll coach from ages 10-18 in aussie rules, soccer and basketball. The first question you ask as a coach is how do you win? The answer of course is simple, score more than the opposition.
From there it follows as a process of how do you score versus how will the opponent prevent you from scoring and conversely how to contain the opponent from scoring and how the opponent will try to score.
I tend to be pretty aggressive in my tactical thinking and to put it very basically, the team with superior offensive capability dictates the tactical terms for a match as it is up to the opponent to change something in order to restrict them from scoring.
Now let’s take that simple line of thought and extrapolate it to the AFL. West Coast is the team with the greatest offensive capability in the competition. For example:
- Over the past two seasons the Eagles are the most efficient team for converting inside forward 50 entries into scoring shots.
- Kennedy is the twice reigning Coleman medallist, having kicked 80 goals in consecutive seasons.
- Kennedy is also the leading player in the competition for marks inside forward 50.
- Darling is one of the best performing second forwards in the league, having kicked over 40 goals in three seasons.
- Lecras is one of the leading medium sized forwards in the competition, having kicked over 40 goals in four seasons.
- Hill kicked 40 goals in 2015.
- Cripps was ranked 3rd in the league for goal assists in 2016.
With the above in mind, it is not unreasonable to argue that given an equal amount of forward entries as the opponent (i.e. midfield stalemate) that the Eagles will win a large majority of their matches unless the opponent changes their tactics.
So what changes can an opponent make to counter a decisive attacking team? There are two primary ways:
- Confine the attack by removing their space (i.e. adding additional players into the defence)
- Starve the attack by cutting off the supply to them (i.e. adding additional players into the midfield)
Under such circumstances, most AFL teams deploy an extra number to the defence (a +1 under the current popular description) as a means of restricting the opposition forwards whilst minimising the negative impact upon their own attack. Indeed, in this post-flooding era, this role is becoming more specialised and is taking on greater significance.
This circumstance however provides the offensively superior team with the opportunity to have a defensive +1 of their own on numerically better terms (6v5 compared to 7v6). Consequently deploying a defensive +1 as a reactive measure may actually make the opposition significantly more difficult to defeat.
I am also of the opinion that McGovern is probably the most influential defensive +1 in the competition right now. On paper, the Eagles are undoubtedly one of the toughest tactical prospects in the league.
Putting it together – Zones and Webs
There is nothing revolutionary about the uptake of zonal marking methodologies that has had such a recent impact upon the AFL. If anything, I am surprised it has taken so long for it to happen. Every other comparable team sport utilises defensive zones tactically with success, it was only a matter of time until someone applied it to AFL. We all know that was Clarkson with the Hawks and now his disciples (Simpson included) are furthering its impact.
What is effective about a zone though?
A disciplined and cohesive zone allows a team to dictate how the opposition will move in order to score. This is a powerful outcome, you can negate the opponent’s main strength or highlight a weakness or make them play to your strength.
So why haven’t we seen zones before? Because they are hard.
Zoning in basketball is fairly simple, your guarding area is generally 3-4m in size and it is pretty straightforward to teach someone where they should be. In the round ball game, the area is larger 5-10m, however the offside rule affords players the knowledge that the opponent can only be on one side of them, making easier to observe and react to their movement. At AFL level players are required to zone areas 15-20m around them, a huge amount of space, without the aid of an offside rule – it’s an extremely difficult tactic to deploy without being cut to shreds by loose players running out the back - just ask Hardwick and Buckley. This is the reason why you won’t see zones in colts or state or AFLW – it takes years of full-time training with the same squad and coaching panel to achieve the discipline and trust that is required to deploy one successfully.
The Eagles under Simpson’s tutelage deploy one of the more effective mobile zones the competition has ever seen, (in)famously dubbed by the media as ‘the Web’. But what actually is it and how does it operate?
The web is a mobile zone that defensively funnels the opposition to move the ball out wide, away from the central corridor and compels them to kick toward a low percentage target (1v2 or 1v3). Additionally, in the outcome of a turnover, the web provides an outstanding avenue to counterattack via quick ball movement through the central corridor.
As you can see the web is actually two zones of five spread equally across the field at both half back and half forward, with a midfield ‘cloud’ starting in the central corridor between them. The back six, arranged in a zone of five plus a sweeper is reminiscent of what defences would probably look like in soccer if the offside rule was not enforced.
You can clearly see how it operates to restrict opposition use of the central corridor and create a defensive environment conducive to aggressive counterattacking from intercept marks.
Untangling the web
So we have the best attack in the competition, an intercept marking specialist who excels as a defensive +1 and a superior tactical approach utilising zones – how do we end up losing games?
It is far too easy to take the herp derp line and blame it all on midfield incompetence.
The web, for all of its merits, is a zone and all zones share one thing: they mark space rather than players. This truth also means zones have an inherent vulnerability: movement. Whether it is screen, screen, pass to free up Curry for three; formation of an overlap for a try; or the false diagonal run across the centre half to allow space for the striker to receive and score; movement (particularly quick movement) destroys zones.
Remember above the second option to contain a superior offensive team – stacking the midfield at the expense of the forwardline. It is here that the seeds of our defeat have been sown.
We’ll play devil’s advocate for a moment, coaching an opposition team against the Eagles.
On first look, things look pretty grim. Nobody is capable of matching Kennedy one-on-one, let alone considering Darling, or Lecras. The web is deployed and McGovern will just intercept all day if allowed to be a +1 whilst their midfield, despite being no better receives first ball from the rucks at the stoppages.
We conduct the following moves:
- Push the half forward flankers up to the wing, into the open spaces that exist in the web.
- Instruct FF and CHF to act in a defensive manner, man-marking McGovern and the next tallest Eagle defender whilst actively engaging to drag them up the ground outside of the fifty meter arc; ideally so far up the ground that it starts to congest the space that Darling has to lead up into.
- Tell the half back flankers to run the length of the wing hard at every opportunity we have the ball.
- Any time the Eagles have a ruckman not rucking in the forwardline rotate a defender that is capable of run-and-carry onto them with the explicit instruction of running off them at every single opportunity that presents.
- Instruct the forward pockets to push up to the fifty meter arc and hook lead back to goal whenever we have the ball.
So now we have a +2 situation to our advantage on both wings, the intercept marking influence of McGovern neutralised, the web brought higher up the ground, creating a paddock out the back and an additional runner at the back of every contest each time they decide to play a ruckman as a forward.
Each time we get the ball it gets fed to the extras on the wing, which then draw the numbers of Eagles massed in the corridor out of position, which then in turn allows runners to be located through the corridor and target the goalward leads running into the space behind the web…
If this sounds familiar, it is precisely what Beveridge and the Bulldogs did against us in the Elimination Final. He knew exactly how we would set up, put a plan into motion and his players executed it perfectly. That they outnumbered us for goal assists by 11 to 1 shows just how easily we were exposed by their running into the space created behind the zone.
We however had set ourselves up for failure before the match even began due to ill-conceived notions that influenced the selections of the match committee.
Slaughtering Sacred Cows
For a moment I was convinced that we would win the flag in 2015. I was converted to this thinking by the performance against the Bulldogs in Round 21 of that season. The Bulldogs had won 8 of their last 9, with the accumulated winning margin of their prior three fixtures approaching 250. Yet we went on to thoroughly trounce them in every aspect of the match, ending up with almost twice the amount of scoring shots and outscoring them in the second half by ten goals.
The epiphany for me in that performance however, was that due to injuries we played without any key defenders in the team and not just survived, but routed one of the best running sides in the competition completely off the park.
The contested possession count was +34 to our advantage. It is the largest deficit the Bulldogs have incurred in that statistic for any match over the last two seasons.
The selection committee didn’t see things the same way however and made changes to bring in key defenders for the trip to Adelaide against the Crows. Unfortunately for us, McGovern was clearly underdone and Barrass not ready; the web couldn’t keep its shape and we were ripped apart by the Crows in one of the most clinical quarters of football you will ever see.
After that, Barrass was sent back to East Perth, Schofield was still injured and we hosted the lowly Saints (who had been belted by the Swans by near 100 the week prior) with McGovern as a lone key defender down back. We were expected to win by 10 goals and did by 15. But it went beyond that – we won the contested possessions by a massive +51 (which is the highest margin that I am aware of for the club in that statistic) and had 21 scorings shots in comparison to just two in the second half.
And there the forced experiment ended. We have never have never gone down this path since.
Half a season later we played the Bulldogs again with our default defensive setup and lost the contested possession count by 39. Three months after that we played them again and lost the count by 23.
I have now come to believe much of our success in 2015 was the product of fortunate accidents which forced the selection committee into playing smaller, more mobile defenders for the majority of the season rather than success by design.
I had high hopes for 2016. Instead our success was ignored and our mistakes not learned from.
We played 21 out of 23 games in 2016 with three key-sized players in defence. In 2015 that number was zero.
We have an unhealthy obsession with tall players. We went into the Elimination Final against the Bulldogs with EIGHT (8!) key sized players in the team (191cm+, 91kg+). The Bulldogs had four (which includes Bontempelli, who is a mutant).
Further to this notion, take a look at what happens when we play differing numbers of key-sized players in our defence:
Amazing. The addition of two key-sized players in defence has a massive impact upon our overall performance.
Look at those statistics. It is evident that with less key players down back, the zone defence operates with greater effectiveness and the team is able to commit more players to the ball.
Yes, I am aware it is a very small sample size to extrapolate from, but the opposition is comparable and it is all the data we have and I believe it remains significant. What is clear however is that we are clearly a worse team when playing three key-sized defenders than when we are playing two.
We get pasted in the midfield, not because of the lack of quality of our primary midfielders. We get beaten due to the lack of rotational options and supporting cast who should be there to ease the burden upon them.
Difficult decisions need to be made.
What is the purpose of deploying a mobile zone if you fill it with immobile players?
It occurs up forward as well. What is the purpose of playing a permanent resting ruckman up forward at the expense of a specialist crumbing forward if you already have two key forwards? How many marks inside forward 50 do our rucks take? Not many. How many times does the ball go to ground inside our forward 50? Certainly far more than the amount of times a ruckman marks it. How many times does the defensive marker of a resting ruckman run off them to spoil the hit-up leads of other forwards or join an attacking move? Again, far more than the amount of times a ruckman marks it. I have a strong distaste for resting ruckmen. When coaching, I refer to them as ‘penguins’ because they can’t /won’t run.
Too many talls. We are strangling ourselves by playing too many talls.
Taking into account our current method of deploying a mobile zone, it is my belief our best performing team would look like this:
These violent delights have violent ends.
I’ll end where I began. We have an exceptional squad. We so easily could have been back to back premiers the last two seasons.
But we will never achieve any success if we don’t change our selection habits.
