Source: AFL Photos
Most major sporting leagues have introduced concessions to smooth the return to play process following unscheduled COVID shutdowns, with world football allowing five substitutes, and the NBA permitting extra player signings before their Orlando bubble season begins later this month. The AFL’s equivalent is a 20% reduction in game time. Amid the chaos and carnage of 2020, cutting four minutes per quarter shouldn’t be a big deal. But our native game is a proud and traditional sport, and it took just one session of post-lockdown footy for the short quarters to end up in the firing line when Richmond and Collingwood grappled their way to a low-scoring draw. Footy has since copped a lot of criticism in general this year, being labelled as “an absolute joke” and described as being “in a dreadful state” by some widely respected names. Throughout it all, the short quarters have never strayed too far from the centre of the debate, but most calls for the return to conventional quarters have missed the mark.
Why have shorter quarters in the first place?
The decision to cut game time was made not only for the health and safety of players, but also for the safety of being able to have a season at all. The prevailing motivation was two-fold: 1) to generally reduce the physical burden on players given that they were coming off a limited preparation, and 2) to essentially leave some footy minutes (and fitness) in reserve, in anticipation of periods where games would have to be played with shorter rests in between them due to a resurgence of COVID restrictions. Both of these ideas serve the function of mitigating injury risk and, importantly, they’re both backed by solid evidence:
Even under conventional circumstances, the collective physical demands of the game are arguably the highest out of any team sport worldwide, and consequently so too are the opportunities for injury. With the addition of COVID complications, things can escalate quickly. During periods of limited training such as a lockdown, there’s an inevitable and well-documented reduction in physical capacity. Staying generally fit was easy enough, but pumping out 5km challenges and doing bicep curls in the squat rack is the footy equivalent of playing connect four to prepare for a chess tournament. When teams were given the all-clear to resume contact training, they had just three weeks to walk the delicate tightrope of safely accumulating specific training again and to avoid a load slingshot, which is best described by Aubrey Graham as going from “0-100, real quick”.
The second reason is rooted in solid evidence too - a collision between post-match recovery and the next game is dangerous territory. For example, in the elite European football leagues, teams with 72 hours or less for recovery have muscle injury rates 20% higher than teams with 6-10 days rest in between games. A condensed schedule also inhibits meaningful in-season training load, which can cost down the track as the season rolls on. In Germany, Dynamo Dresden became the subjects of a cruel congestion experiment when, after they became the only team forced back into quarantine due to a COVID outbreak, they returned to play 7 games in 19 days. Their team experienced five significant injuries in under a month while suffering a 37% drop in goals scored and were ultimately relegated.
Evidently, when the two factors collide – a limited preparation phase and the potential for a tight schedule – it’s a recipe for disaster. All things considered, the AFL’s decision to stockpile footy minutes for a rainy day is entirely justified. Much to their credit, through the incessant calls to restore conventional game times, they persevered. And it’s a good thing they did, because that rainy day has arrived. From round 9 onwards, games will be played on a condensed schedule, including 33 games in 19 days. It’s not ideal. It’s certainly not recommended. But it’s happening. Perhaps the most important thing is the distribution of inter-game rests between teams. When the turnarounds are rapid, every single day counts, and any discrepancies in rest periods could prove critical not only in deciding the outcome of the game, but determining the injury fate of players. With an unprecedented footy-fest on the horizon, there’s no better time to take a snapshot of the current injury situation across the league.
Familiar Foes
The early indications were promising - for the first two weeks of the restart, general injury rates were even on the low end of normal, and it seemed the acute benefits from short quarters shielded the AFL from the same fate as the Bundesliga. Even now, overall match injuries aren’t significantly above normal – they’re currently sitting at 1.45 general injuries per game vs 1.30 per game from the same period last year, although this is with 928mins of less footy being played and some teams are struggling more than others. But just as teams were breathing an early collective sigh of relief, a familiar foe reared its ugly head – hamstrings.
The rate of hamstring injuries since the restart is .38 per game, compared with .22 per game for the same rounds last year. In amongst it, there’s a three-week period of substantially elevated risk, with .61 hamstring injuries occurring per game across rounds 4-6. For some added perspective, if this rate was sustained across an entire traditional season, we’d see a staggering 126 players go down with in-game hamstring injuries across half a calendar year. Perhaps unsurprisingly, most of the players suffering hamstring injuries this season have one thing in common – they’ve had prior hamstring troubles:
Alongside a prior injury, another leading risk factor for hamstring injuries is age, and that’s right on par this season too - the median age of current AFL players is 23.6 years, while the median age of players suffering in-game hamstring injuries is 28. Other contributing factors include eccentric hamstring strength and appropriate exposure to and accumulation of sprinting, both of which were vulnerable to deficiencies during the lockdown. Add in the complexities of hub life and the additional stresses of this season, and the writing was on the wall.
But this information is not new to teams. They’re well aware of the risk factors contributing to hamstring injuries, and they’re accustomed to dealing with them in droves - each club dealt with around 6.4 hamstring across training and matches in 2018. To be fair, teams are stuck in a unique situation where they’re up against a unique and complex set of challenges. With the abbreviated season causing each game to grow in importance in the tightly-contested race for finals, it’s little surprise that teams are ‘running the gauntlet’ by taking risks with soft-tissue concerns. But there’s a difference between running the gauntlet and making palpably uncalculated decisions which have the capacity to cost the club in the long run. Among the hamstrung players over the last month have been North Melbourne and Fremantle captains Jack Ziebell and Nat Fyfe. Despite a history of hammy troubles for both players, their clubs elected to select them 20 and 14 days after their injuries respectively. While we don’t have full context of the extent of their original injuries, we do know that both players suffered subsequent hamstring injuries in their return games. Remarkably, both clubs have doubled down on their decisions - North Melbourne coach Rhys Shaw claimed that Ziebell’s injury was “just bad luck”, whereas Fremantle boss Justin Longmuir maintains that they made the right call with Fyfe, boldly claiming that he “wouldn’t take the decision back”. It’s a disappointing lack of accountability from two clubs who are lingering towards the bottom of the table and will now be without their leaders for an unnecessarily extended period of time as they face an uphill battle to remain relevant in the finals race. On the flip side, West Coast coach Adam Simpson has been refreshingly open about his team’s slow start to the season, citing an increase in training load as a potential contributing factor to skipper Luke Shuey’s hamstring injury. Shuey was originally scheduled to make his return in the Western Australian derby on Sunday, but perhaps with one eye on Ziebell and the other on Fyfe, he was removed from the team before the bounce.
Of course, there were always going to be casualties. Nobody has all the answers, especially at a time like this. But even if they did, there is compelling evidence to suggest that some teams may not listen anyway. For now, it’s clear that while the games in 2020 may be short, playing the long game with hamstring injury return is almost always the right one. Realistically, the hamstring injury rate will not stay this high season-long. However, the period of increased injury risk is outliving the period observed in the Bundesliga, and the season isn’t even halfway done. The addition of fixture congestion might be enough to sustain an elevated injury rate for an extended period of time, and given that player availability is a validated predictor of ladder position, hamstrings could play an increasingly critical role as the season rolls on.
Fast Footy
A key concern with the shorter quarters was that they would allow the defensive tactics that have prevailed over the last decade to dictate the game even further, creating bogged-down snoozefests. It makes sense in theory. Periods of fatigue create lapses in running, defensive structure and pressure, helping to open games up, and the short quarters have the potential to minimise these free-flowing windows by limiting that fatigue. In order to characterise how the reduced game-time impacts the running dynamics of the game, and also to provide some insight on how teams physically responded following the lockdown, we crunched the numbers into ‘per minute’ stats to calculate relative running metrics:
2020 footy is comfortably being played at a higher relative intensity than the same period of 2019 footy. This may have slightly backfired in terms of increasing acute relative sprinting exposure and injury risk, which could accidentally balance out some of the short-quarter benefits associated with the reduction of fatigue throughout the season. However, the short quarters have so far allowed teams to maintain a certain standard of output without falling into an accumulated fatigue hole - round 7 saw the highest numbers for the big four running categories so far this season. It’s not just the league-wide running numbers that are of interest, but which teams are doing the running too:
Western Bulldogs may seem like a strange selection here given that they’re outside the 8, but they’re only down on percentage, and they’re one of only three teams to win 4 out of their last 5 games – the other two are Port and Brisbane. On the flip side, there’s one side in particular that stands out for the wrong reasons:
Beyond those featured above, the usual suspects in Collingwood, Geelong, West Coast and Richmond are all predictably punching out some decent running numbers as well. But they haven’t had it all their own way this season, and the first signs that their stranglehold on the league is loosening have been accompanied by declines in their relative running metrics. For example, during the same period last season, Richmond were comfortably ranked first in sprints and repeated sprints per game, but have only mustered enough to be ranked 9th and 4th respectively this season, and Collingwood are one of the few teams operating at a substantially lower relative intensity than 2019. Interestingly, Carlton are making a habit of disarming some of the league’s best running teams. Just last week, they overwhelmed the Bulldogs to record a 52-point victory, and over the weekend they became the only team this year to outsprint ladder-leaders Port Adelaide on their way to a narrow loss after the siren. They’ve recently outsprinted and beaten Geelong too, and are quietly collecting a promising 2020 portfolio.
It seems that the short-quarters are proving particularly fruitful for a certain brand of footy, allowing teams who emphasise running to flourish. But of course, none of this matters if teams can’t hit the scoreboard with any sort of conviction, and there’s no better example of this than North Melbourne, who rank third in distance covered but have lost five consecutive games. There’s also an elephant in the room - or in this case, a Lion. Despite being the only side to defeat Port Adelaide and confirming their status as an early premiership favourite, Brisbane are ranked between 16th-18th in the four major running categories. If these reported GPS numbers are indeed correct, it’s further proof of the limitations stemming from analysing purely running numbers alone. It’s not just general speed and running that matters, but speed of the footy too – Brisbane have the fastest average possession chain leading to a shot on goal.
The Verdict
One of the key grievances with the short-quarter season is, of course, the lack of action on the scoreboard. Even when converted to relative stats per minute, there has been an approximate 4% drop-off in scoring from the same period last season. But scoring has been slipping almost annually since the turn of the century, and 2019 was the lowest scoring season in 52 years. Accordingly, claiming the short quarters as a root cause of the problem is a cop out. Instead, we might simply be watching the wrong games. After all, Collingwood or Richmond have played in the three lowest scoring games this season, yet have featured in 42.9% of prime-time slots. The AFL seems to be aware that the teams most improved in the scoring department are also the best runners in the league – the upcoming round 8 fixture has Gold Coast vs the Bulldogs on Thursday night, and a Saturday night primetime slot allocated to Port Adelaide and St Kilda. So, give it a chance – while the umpiring needs some tweaking (when doesn’t it?), footy isn’t broken, and it doesn’t need a grand fix. The game is evolving, like it always has done. The fact that the most-improved teams have outrun their opponents to catapult themselves into contention might be evidence that the temporary era of short-quarter footy has the potential to accelerate the evolution process, and could help pivot the league away from overly congested play. Hamstrings will continue to haunt teams for at least a little while longer yet, but the short-quarters are here to stay in 2020, and their temporary presence has been a justified net-positive for the league.