How the two most important kicks in football are letting the Brisbane Lions down

It’s always the siren, followed by the silence and then the song that gets the brain ticking about what just happened and — more importantly — why it happened.

At the media conference table, a coach muses. It’s a hard thing to do, breaking down what went wrong publicly minutes after it happened.

Brisbane Lions coach Chris Fagan is no stranger to this experience.

Fagan has faced the media post-match 157 times, with 68 coming after losses.

The chatter in the days after the match have been dictated by a short soundbite from those media conferences.

“It was more about effort and contest in the second half and turning the ball over almost unforced at different times,” Fagan said after the Lions’ 54-point loss to the Giants at Manuka Oval on Anzac Day.

“I don’t really know the answer at this point in time. We have no excuses. We just didn’t work as hard as they did.”

Fagan’s full statements to ABC Sport after the match put the loss in more context.

He stated that most of the underlying figures for the Lions this year are better than last season.

For example, they lead the league for inside-50 differential. They are also in the top four in generating front-half intercepts, vital to the success of every team.

“One of our strengths this year, our best strength probably, and where we’ve been most consistent is our team defence,” he said.

“We actually haven’t been leaking a lot of scores against or a lot of shots.”

The Lions have improved their ability to put pressure on opposition sides and their whole ground-defence has improved from a high base.

“Up until tonight, a lot of our numbers have been better than they were last year in terms of being able to get the ball inside 50 and being able to stop the opposition from getting inside 50s,” Fagan said after the Giants match.

Despite some commentators calling Charlie Cameron and Joe Daniher lazy, their defensive numbers appear up this year as well.

While Cameron’s tackle inside-50 numbers have dipped, his forward-half pressure acts have increased. Cameron remains one of the best defensive small forwards in the game.

Daniher also has more pressure acts per match this year than any other season during his Lions career.

It’s much easier to launch criticism based on one bad clip than analyse a full match or a season of efforts to date.

Instead, Fagan pointed to another area of their game that could be the cause of their issues: their once-deadly attack.

“The problem in the first six weeks has been scoring accuracy, dropping marks inside 50, things like that,” he said.

Fagan alluded to the two kicks considered to be the most important in footy: the kick inside 50 and the shot at goal.

One puts points on the board and the other directly leads to the chance to score.

No matter how good sides are for the rest of the match, failure at one or both of these elements can cast a team’s hopes aside.

This year, the previously freewheeling Lions offence is struggling thanks to failings relating to these critical kicks.

The entry

Last year, Fagan told ABC Sport that flexibility was a crucial part of the Lions’ successful attacking structure.

“We always try to mix up our mix. We’ve got small forwards who can mark the ball and are dangerous close to goal,” Fagan said.

“We’ve got tall forwards who can play up the ground and help connect us up.

“Some weeks it suits us to play our small forwards closer to goal and other weeks it suits us to play our talls, because we think we might get an advantage with them.”

That flexibility has caused chaos in opposition defences in previous seasons. It seems like the balance of roles might be a little off this year.

The kick inside 50 has been broken down in ever increasing detail by clubs in recent years. From launch zones to hotspots, teams know where the most valuable real estate on the ground is.

Most kicks coming inside 50 come from about 20-30 metres from the arc, enough distance out to either launch a short chip towards a leading player or bomb it on the head of someone leading back towards goal.

This launch zone stretches defences and usually makes a side’s attack tick.

The effectiveness of these kicks change based on the location of the launch. Generally scores get higher the closer to goal a launch is, but not dramatically after the 60-80 golden zone. Bombs from beyond that are more speculative.

Brisbane’s profile in this respect is relatively unchanged from last year. Their kick distance from these spots also appears to be broadly following league trends.

Another big part of the picture is who is doing the kicking and who they are targeting inside 50. Most sides have preferred users: players who can pinpoint a target under pressure and process opposing defences.

Finding the right players to deliver the ball inside 50 is critical to a team’s attacking chances.

This year, Daniher is the most common user going inside 50, closely followed by Hugh McCluggage. That’s the same top two as last year but the rest of the profile has shifted somewhat.

The absence of several high-quality ball movers and users in Keidean Coleman, Will Ashcroft and Conor McKenna — all sidelined due to long-term injury — and Daniel Rich to retirement appears to have left the load falling more heavily on others who are perhaps less adept with their delivery.

There have been knock-on declines in the effectiveness of other players as they take over more of the role. This has especially hit Dayne Zorko, but also most of the midfield core.

Overall, the Lions have struggled to undertake ‘quality’ kicks inside 50. These are the kicks that end in uncontested marks or marks on leads. The share of those quality kicks has dropped while the number of kicks to packs has increased.

That’s a suboptimal way to operate up forward and is indicative of bigger timing and connection issues between lines.

Equally important is the player being targeted inside 50.

At the centre of the Lions forward-50 potency last season was a balance between the three focal points of Daniher, Eric Hipwood and Cameron, who were each recipients of similar shares of the ball.

Support acts such as Jack Gunston, Lincoln McCarthy and Cam Rayner also saw their fair share of the ball coming their way.

This year, the focus has shifted strongly towards Daniher, with Hipwood and Cameron targeted significantly less often.

Replacing the departed Gunston is converted defender Darcy Gardiner, with Lincoln McCarthy and youngster Kai Lohmann also more prominent. Rayner has switched further upfield.

Fagan made it clear to ABC Sport the change hasn’t been an intentional one.

“We certainly haven’t tried to change the way that we’re playing,” Fagan said after the Giants match.

“It’s been a pretty successful way to play for the last five or so years.”

Overall, the profile has shifted from a multi-headed monster and stable secondary forwards to one primary target and a support cast. At this stage it doesn’t seem like it has worked.

Astute readers will have noted the commonality between the list of inside-50 kickers and their targets. This year the entire forward-entry burden seems to be falling much more heavily on one man as both the supplier and the target.

No player in the league is as involved in forward entries as Daniher this year.

He’s not the only dual threat — both a target and kicker — but he’s unique when compared to Charlie Curnow, Taylor Walker and Jeremy Cameron in leading his club on both sides of the ball.

It’s the sort of multifaceted forward-entry centrality formerly seen with Lance Franklin. Unfortunately, while Daniher’s efficiency was above league average in both aspects last year, he’s slipped significantly this season.

Hipwood, the other part of the tall-forward double act, has also collapsed in effectiveness as a forward target, falling from among the most productive high-frequency forward targets in the league last year to the least productive major option league-wide so far in 2024.

On average, the Lions are scoring less than half a point when he’s the player targeted by an inside 50.

Some slack has been picked up by a more effective McCarthy but the big-man tandem is not working, with Daniher shouldering such a heavy upfield workload.

Part of this is also down to how they are filling the third tall option, with Gardiner not showing more than flashes in that spot. He’s also operating well below league average when being targeted.

In short, both parts of the inside-50 kick aren’t working at the moment. And it’s no better when the ball does find the hands of a Lions forward.

Kicking goals

Despite the importance of the kick inside 50, the actual shot at goal still remains the most important act in football.

The easiest way to work out whether a team has made the most of their chances at goal is by looking at raw goals and behinds from scoring shots.

It’s crude but has some truth to it.

On that measure Brisbane has the worst accuracy in the league, with just 46 per cent of its scores being goals.

In recent years football analysts have come up with more sophisticated measures of how well players — and teams — perform in front of goal. The most public of these measures is xScore, which is short for “expected score”.

The first public version of xScore for the AFL was developed by Melbourne FC football staffer Rob Younger on his website Figuring Footy in 2017.

Younger analysed several years worth of shots at goal to work out how likely a shot will be a goal depending on the location and the situation.

This probability was then converted to an “expected” value between zero and six. Almost-certain goals — like a set-shot from the goal line — are close to a six, while a bomb from the centre of the ground would be close to a zero.

The real final score for a given game can be compared to xScore to show how good a team’s chances were as distinct from how they actually converted.

This comparison can be important intelligence for teams who need to separate the result of their forward craft from the method behind it.

Since Younger’s early work a wide variety of different xScore measures have been publicly disclosed, but all track about the same results-wise.

ABC Sport have used the version developed by Andrew Whelan for WheeloRatings.

The Lions’ 2024 xScore reveals that they are also underperforming in front of goal so far this year. This has sapped the momentum of all that valuable up-ground work, adding to their existing forward-line woes.

Last year, the Lions performed at just above league average according to xScore.

The picture is particularly bad when it comes to set-shots. Set-shots are the part of the game that seems to be the most controllable, but can often be the most maddening.

While the Lions’ general play conversion has been only just a touch below expectations, they have been the worst team in the league on the set-shot.

The Lions have suffered not only from their own low set-shot conversion, but also the misfortune of facing opponents with hot set-shot conversions themselves.

While there’s an argument for general play accuracy to be influenced by things such as pressure, an opponent taking their set chances is essentially out of a team’s hands.

For example, the Giants kicked an amazing six goals from outside 50 against the Lions last week, leaving Fagan spellbound.

“I’ve never seen a team kick so well from outside 50 as they did tonight. It was incredible,” he said.

All told, the Lions might be a couple of goals worse off per game purely from relative shot conversion. That’s enough to swing games or make defeats look much less damning.

The road ahead

At the end of the media conference in Canberra, Fagan waxed lyrical about one of the biggest things that has impacted the Lions’ two-win start to the year.

“I know we’ve had a tough draw to start the year,” he said.

“We’ve played the Giants and we’ve played Carlton, and we’ve played Geelong. We played Collingwood and Melbourne, so there’s some pretty good teams.”

The Lions have played the other three preliminary finalists from last season so far this year. They’ve also played the 2021 and 2022 premiers to boot.

The next eight weeks will see the Lions face one of the easiest schedules in the league. There’s a real chance that — between random set-shot kicking chances and their upcoming fixture — the Lions will be in the top eight by round 16.

They could even be a fair bit higher.

If that’s the case, all the hand-wringing around “effort” will be wasted energy all around.

Some of the work Brisbane needs to do to right the ship is a little harder, such as working out that connection going into the attacking 50.

It could mean that Daniher and Cameron revert to playing a little deeper, with Hipwood roaming higher than normal.

Regardless of the fixes, Fagan has faith in his group and knows his role in helping his team going forward.

“We can play a lot better than that,” Fagan said after the loss to the Giants.

“We can play footy … confidence is a quirky thing in sport. It comes and it goes. I’ve got to help those boys find their confidence and connection again. That’s my job.”