THE STRUCTURAL RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE 4 CO-ACTIVES OF PERFORMANCE IN AFL

                                           

A few weeks ago my Twitter feed was blessed by this post from a skill acquisition specialist from Sydney Job Fransen.

The post was about a study he was a part of conducting with a bunch of others called "A Holistic Analysis of Collective Behavior and Team Performance in Australian Football via Structural Equation Modeling", or to put it simply, the structural relationship between technical, tactical, physical and psychological aspects during a game of football.

Just to refresh in a very simplified way, the 4 co-actives of performance are:

1. Technical - skill actions like kicks, marks and handballs
2. Tactical - team formations like center square set up and defensive set ups
3. Physical - anything that puts physical loading on a player such as sprinting, collisions and change and direction.
4. Psychological - the emotional stress a player is under at any given time in a game.

According to this study, the big takeaways were:

• Scoring opportunities + ball movement had direct associations with quarter margin (construct your ball movement to result in a high quality inside 50 entries and thus, greater scoring opportunities)
• Unpredictability, uncontested behavior and physical behavior did not (a lack of game plan, high uncontested game relative to contested game and a lot of running and collisions doesn't really get you anywhere)
• Negative associations between uncontested behavior and scoring opportunity suggest that elevated high-pressure success and a lack of synchrony may positively influence scoring opportunity - a determinant of quarter margin (perfect formations around the ball is great but you have to win the ball above all else!) 
• There were also negative associations between physical behavior and ball movement suggesting that with less physical work, a team's collective ability to transfer possession between teammates is facilitated (the best team's do less work from greater organisation and thus, predictability, with and without the ball)

The major implications here is that game plans and training that focus on optimising attacking and low-pressure ball movement coupled with with high levels of mutual interaction between teammates may be beneficial for performance.

In a nutshell, you want a very successful contested game that allows you to break congestion as fast as possible and then you can use a possession style of footy (kick, mark, kick mark) with some basic principles for team cohesion that will hopefully result in minimal possessions under direct pressure from the opposition.

In my next post I'll post some stats from some games from round 1 in response to this.