Who’s the whipping boy this season (2019-2022)?

[K]

But you set it up as Grundy vs. the mids. Maybe Grundy and the mids are all to blame.

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies2016]

[Pies4shaw]

Against Sydney, the Bulldogs lost the hitouts 49 to 20 but won the clearances 41 to 32.

Against Hawthorn, the Bulldogs lost the hitouts 46 to 17 but won the clearances 37 to 25.

Against Gold Coast, the Bulldogs lost the hitouts 71 to 16 but won the clearances 44 to 30.

Against Collingwood, the Bulldogs lost the hitouts 60 to 6 and lost the clearances 26 to 33.

Notably, Grundy had 91% of the hitouts (in the other games, the figures were 71%, 73% and 82%) and Collingwood won the clearances by 7 (previous opponents had lost clearances by 9, 12 and 14). So, Collingwood is the only team to win the stoppages against the Bulldogs and turned around that aspect of the game by 21 clearances - from -14 to +7 - compared to Gold Coast's effort the previous week.

Whatever Grundy did with his other 40 hitouts - and whatever the perception may be on Nick's - the Bulldogs did not clear the ball away from contests at anything like the rate they did against other teams in their three previous games this season and - whilst I agree English is hopeless and it's only been a matter of degree each week - scarcely touched the ball in the ruck contest.

[5 from the wing on debut]

The hit-out stat is hardly worth keeping. The soft tap to a team mate standing at your feet, who is surrounded by opponents and immediately tied up, is worthless in the way that we are currently seeing it.

Effective hit outs are the important ones. They are normally hit into clear space which at least give a team mate the chance to run onto it and keep going.

I would've liked to see one of our midfielders standing 4 or 5 metres goalside of centre at centre bounces and have Grundy aim there. That may have worked and it would also have dragged another Dogs midfielder away from Grundy's feet at the centre bounce which would leave more room and space for a soft tap.

[Pies4shaw]

[Pies2016]

[K]

[Pies4shaw]

You're welcome, Pies2016. If anyone can tell us where to find "effective hitouts" or "hitouts to advantage", that would be great, too.

It is probably useful to recognise that over half our clearances were effected by Grundy (6), Adams (6) and Pendlebury (5) between them. Crisp (!!!), Treloar and JDG each had 3, whilst Sidey and Phillips each had 2.

Hopefully, Treloar's figures will pick up - he started slowly last year but had much better figures as the season progressed, even after he came back from injury. Because he's been moved to play predominantly on the wing, Sidey's clearance numbers are well down on 2018 - he hasn't had more than 3 clearances in a game this year but last year, he averaged 4. Beams is supposed to pick up that slack (he averaged 5.6 clearances per game last year, second only - amongst our players - to Adams who averaged 6.2, with Grundy and Pendlebury each in the 5s and Treloar almost at 5) but, whilst he was adequate against Geelong and Richmond, he had just the 1 clearance against West Coast.

[K]

Where did you get the other stats? afl.com.au will have "hitouts to advantage".

[Pies4shaw]

AFL tables and footywire.

[Pies4shaw]

I can't, yet, find any compilation of stats for "hitouts to advantage" over time that lets me see the stat historically across many seasons for lots of great ruckmen but Triple M has compiled a bunch of stats from the 2018 season, here: https://www.triplem.com.au/story/all-the-records-from-2018-107088

Those are just for the home and away season, by the looks of things, but they suggest that "hitouts to advantage" for the two best ruckmen of 2018 were about one-third of their hitouts. On that basis, Grundy probably had, say, somewhere between 0.5 and 2 less effective hitouts than we might have anticipated in such a dominant display of rucking against Footscray. That's hardly the reason for our clearance difficulties.

The AFL site has the following list from 2017. It records the most hitouts to advantage in a season, then, as 316 (Gawn in 2016) and says the stat has been kept since 1999. I guess that means Gawn's 348 last year was probably the home and away record.

https://www.afl.com.au/news/2017-12-28/alltime-season-stats-recordholders

There's a link in that article to the 2017 stats leaders. It shows Jacobs as leading hitouts and effective hitouts in 2017 (when Adealide, of course, made the Grand Final). He had 254 hitouts to advantage from 882 hitouts won, which had him going at a bit under 29%, I think.

[Presti35]

Rupert Wills

[Magpietothemax]

[Pies4shaw]

^ No he isn't a whipping boy. He just played a poor game. The two are quite different.

My view on Wills is simple. I like him. I've advocated for his inclusion in previous seasons. I watched his last VFL game against Essendon and thought he had no impact on the game early when it was there to be won. It was my view that he would not be able to play good footy at AFL level in that form. The team then had a bye and he was picked after the bye, more or less out of necessity - we lost two mids and no-one else could be picked following the Essendon VFL game because the senior-listed mids were all useless in that match until the game was over. He played about how I thought he might on the back of what I'd seen in the VFL.

Langdon is the whipping boy - it doesn't matter who falls over in the goal square, who misses the defensive punch or which player's opponent does all the damage for the opposition, he gets the blame for it. The team has got the second best defence in the AFL and people still want him replaced by a bloke who can't run out of sight on a dark night, hasn't touched a footy in anger for 12 months and apparently can't stand up for any length of time without his ACLs falling out.