Quote Originally Posted by ugg View Post
Gulden was mentioned in the latest episode of the ESPN Footy Podcast, where one of the regulars is a Champion Data employee who provides stats to back up their discussions. They were talking about the best kicks in the AFL and one of the other hosts mentioned that he 'felt' that Gulden was one of the best kicks in the competition and asked the CD guy whether the stats backed that up. He said overall Gulden was landing kicks 2% less than expected (based on the difficulty of the kick, distance, pressure applied) than the average, but interestingly when broken down into short (<40m) and long (40m+) kicks, Gulden was 2nd worst in the comp (behind B.Crouch) in short kicks, and 7th best in long kicks.
I think there's a little mix of genuine creativity, confidence in his own skills and the "you miss 100% of the shots you don't take" mindset that leads to Errol's overall kicking efficiency seeming a bit lower than we might expect. The short vs. long is quite interesting, I wonder how many of those short kicks are when playing an inside role (which I guess pressure applied would cater for) or cute/outlandish genuine attempts to thread a needle.