"Bad kicking is bad football"
Considering the sport is called football, it's safe to assume that kicking is a rather important part of the game so when, how and who you kick to does indeed have a mammoth baring on game results.
There is nowhere near enough focus on improving kicking at community level and although I suspect many coaches they are trying to do that at training, they really aren't with the way they designing their training sessions in the short and long term.
Most of what we see is skill, or, technique rehearsal where we receive unopposed, kick to an already pre-determined player in an already pre-determined spot, and then kick unopposed to a player unopposed.
There is no constraints based around space, time, ball location, score or opposition - the main elements that go into decision-making during.
This all leaves players displaying the same skill level season-after-season and zero kicking improvement which is a coaching issues,make no mistake about it.
Coaches not taking this account are leaving so much on the table regarding player development, it's not funny.
The notes taken from this study (I can't find the link for it!) will provide you with an insight of what actually happens in games and then you can go to work on using the same, or similar, constraints at training to dramatically increase your game representation during training and thus, transfer.
- Low kicking effectiveness was associated with physical pressure (35%) v high efficiency emerged when kicking to an open target (70%)
- On average, each player executes a kick every 10mins within an AFL match
- 0 - 2sec time in possession demonstrated a level of 50% effectiveness v a time in possession of 4 – 6secs x 64%
- Match effectiveness was 54%
- There are 4 levels of pressure x closing, chasing, physical or no pressure
- Kick % after a groundball, handball receive or from stoppage all dropped below match average v after a mark or free kick which were above the match average
- A kick under physical pressure from an immediate opposition ranges from 37 – 71% in effectiveness depending on the level of the time in possession
- Under frontal pressure it varies from 43 – 56% based on time in possession
- Kicks over 40m have increased effectiveness with shorter time in possession (0 – 2/2 – 4secs)
- Maintaining possession for between 2 – 4/4 – 6secs for kicks under or over 40m respectively result in the emergence of a higher % of effective kicks so to account for constraint interaction/s, the ranking of 0 – 2sec possesion time was used which showed a 50% kicking efficiency, only 4% below the average
- Kicking efficiency doesn’t show any context of what kicks are being performed by the player
- Short kicks attained by winning the ball in a stoppage, but also under pressure and a time in poss of 0 – 2secs, go at 14.6% efficiency
- Players are more confident kicking over short distances to open targets/from free kick-marks (80 – 90% conversion) v from possession sources in general play (38 – 45%) suggesting players potentially do not have the skill-set to gather/receive the ball under severe time constraints and then kick effectively to a covered target
