Improving the interpretation of skill indicators in professional Australian Football.

OBJECTIVES

This study aimed to provide a simplified, novel method for analysing technical skill involvements in an Australian Football context by reducing the dimensionality of commonly reported skill counts obtained from Australian Football League (AFL) games. This may facilitate their practical use and interpretability.

DESIGN

Retrospective longitudinal design where individual players' technical skill counts were collected over three seasons of official AFL games.

METHODS

Seventy-three skill count values provided publicly by ChampionData® were collected for each match over a three-year analysis period. A principal component analysis was used to reduce the dimensionality of a large number of correlated technical skill indicators into a smaller set of uncorrelated components whilst maintaining most of the variance from the original data set.

RESULTS

The principal component analysis derived four principal components pertaining to high-pressure success, low-pressure success, attacking ball movement ability and scoring ability.

CONCLUSIONS

This study is the first to provide a simplified, novel method for analysing technical skill counts in Australian Football. The derived metrics reveal useful information for coaches and practitioners. This may consequently ease the interpretation of skill count data available to coaches from games, guide opposition analysis, help in the design of representative practice and inform player performance ratings.