Oh look. Swans on the bottom of the frees kicks for the last decade and a half, and by a country mile. All my friends, who have been telling me that I'm biased can suck it.
Oh look. Swans on the bottom of the frees kicks for the last decade and a half, and by a country mile. All my friends, who have been telling me that I'm biased can suck it.
Given that GWS have been in existence for less than half the time period shown in the graphic, double their tally and it�s clear there�s an anti-Sydney conspiracy.
To be fair, Selwood knew how to stage for the free kick, it wasn�t necessarily the umpires fault. Selwood used to drop his knees to force high contact, or duck into tackles. The umpires just call the high contact. As for the 2016 GF (and season in general), well, I feel I�ve already said enough.
Surprised to see the hawks near the bottom, looks like they got smashed between 2005 and 2011. What happened there?
Can't tell whether you're stirring, ugg. I think you are. Not that the stats aren't alarming. I don't think it's anything as simple as a 'get Sydney' conspiracy' (unlike the trade ban).
I think the problem is that our crowds aren't as vocal as the others. Crowds in Perth strongly and loudly favour the home teams, ditto in Adelaide. Not so much in Sydney and Brisbane. How do the big Melbourne clubs go against out of towners at home? (The effect would be less pronounced when they're playing other Melbourne teams represented in the crowd.)
SCG crowds are relatively polite and quiet except when something happens or the game is very close. I haven't been to Adelaide Oval but on TV you get the impression the crowd noise never falls below a dull roar and is wild when free kicks should be paid or goals scored by home team etc.
Attached images have a habit of vanishing for me...let's see how this goes.
I've been thinking about this data. There's at least one error in there: -4 for Adelaide in 2017 should be +4 (based on FootyWire statistics), so we should be cautious.
I have some issues with the presentation:
- Free kicks are summed over a long, arbitrary period during which personnel and game style changed
- There's no indication of what's "normal" - i.e. average, over time, by team or for the league as a whole
- It's hard to see whether teams are going "better" or "worse" than average over time
- It would be informative to see the numbers for home versus away games
So I made a very minimalist chart which strips away all the axes, labels, years, numbers...and just shows the trends for 2010-2017. Coloured by home or away, with the averages across those seasons, for all teams (dotted lines) and each team (dashed lines), allowing comparison to each season.
I haven't shown any zero lines, on purpose. Partly to avoid clutter. But also because I'd like people to focus on the trends or comparisons, not whether frees for equals frees against. We tend to assume that equal free kicks awarded equals a "fair game" - but why? There are many legitimate reasons why free kick counts could be different. Go on, think of some
afl_fd.jpg
Some initial observations.
Adelaide are very close to the league average for both home and away games, as are Essendon and Richmond.
Brisbane, GWS and St Kilda get nothing.
For all the cries of "free kick Hawthorn", their free kick differential away is close to the league average, and lower than average for home.
West Coast at home is outrageously high. But both home and away have declined in recent years.
A lot of the Bulldogs differential in 2016 was driven by much higher than average away values.
As for the Swans: our home average is close to league average, our away average somewhat less than the league and both have been below the team average the last couple of seasons.
Make of all that what you will. I don't know that any of it alters outcomes, but West Coast sure is interesting.
Thanks for that, neilfws!! A lot of effort went into that, it would seem.
Can I propose we have a separate thread each week regarding umpires, please? Keep the topic away from the match thread? Happy to start one each week myself. I, personally, would rather not read about umpires every week.
C'mon Chels!
Great post, neilfws! Thanks for the effort.
One thing that strikes me is that "interstate" teams (i.e. non VFL) seem to have a bigger gap between their home and away free kick averages than the Melbourne teams overall. The WA teams and Port in particular do, us to a fair extent too, but GWS, Adelaide and Qld teams not so much. To me this lends credence to the 'sound of acclamation' or crowd noise theory - particularly when you factor in that the expansion teams and Brisbane don't get such great home support. Doesn't account for Adelaide though. Collingwood seem to have the smallest difference between home and away averages and perhaps this is due to the vocal and strong support they get from their dedicated fans even when they're away from home.
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