That settles it: Moe, Wonthaggi have league's best defense
There’s a quiet competition going on between the best teams in the Gippsland League about which club has the best defense and league stats man Paul Carter might have settled that argument at the halfway stage in the season.
“OFFENSE sells tickets,” they say, “but defense wins championships.”
It’s a popular refrain in sporting circles often attributed to famous University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant but repeated by every great coach of the modern era.
And, along those lines, there’s a quiet competition going on between the best teams in the Gippsland League about which club has the best defense.
And the league’s stats man extraordinaire, Paul Carter, might have just settled that argument, at least up until the end of Round 9.
In amongst some astonishing analysis of the stats for the first half of the season, is a table of numbers that puts the two defences, at Moe and Wonthaggi, on relatively equal footing on top, with Leongatha next and premiership contenders Warragul languishing behind Traralgon on one of the measures.
They clearly haven’t heard Allan Jeans’ “pay the price” speech delivered to them by new coach Gary Ayres yet.
Moe leads the table as the “hardest team to score goals against”, with opponents needing on average 5.21 entries into the forward 50 to get a goal while Wonthaggi leads the “hardest to score against” category with teams needing 2.56 entries for each score.
Moe and Wonthaggi are either first or second in the “best defense” numbers, with Leongatha a clear third on “hardest to goal against”, and Traralgon’s defense edging out Warragul.
But right through Paul Carter’s assessment of the statistics to the end of Round 9, there are some telling numbers, like Moe running up the worst “frees against” stats in the league and Leongatha franking the arrival of new ruckman, Jack Sheridan, by smashing the “hit outs differential” overall with 329 hit outs against the next best, Moe, with 112 hit outs across the nine rounds.
And on the ‘tackle differential’, which is both a measure of a team's intent and an indicator of which team has the ball more often, Warragul leads with 69 more tackles than their opponents across the nine games and Bairnsdale on 52 but with the leading clubs well down; Leongatha +23 tackles, Moe -28 and Wonthaggi a whopping -73 down on their opponents.
Clearly on these figures, Warragul has adopted "tackles" as a KPI for them this season while Wonthaggi could probably lift their game in that department.
Here for your interest is Paul Carter’s analysis of the statistics to the end of Round 9 (thanks Paul):
