Applying common sense to wide count

Inspired by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, Rob Carroll has taken to crunching the numbers in GAA — but discovered one manager’s fish is another’s foul when it comes to stats.

When it comes to numbers in the GAA I have a well-worn obsession which regular readers will be distressingly familiar with.

When is a wide not a wide? If a forward drops the ball over the end-line near the corner-flag is that the same as screwing the ball wide from inside the square? Does it count as a wide? Nerdish I know, but it’s what some of us have instead of a social life.

“That’s okay, I live in that world too,” says Rob Carroll of Gaelicstats.com and Tocasports.com.

“I don’t understand the ‘wide’, to be honest. I don’t understand, if there’s not a shot, why is it counted as a wide for one thing. Second, why the obsession just with wides?

“There are so many variations of missed chances. Pick up the paper and it’s goals, points and wides, but there could be twice as many misses as wides, it’s just that they don’t get reported. I’d mark something like that [the corner-forward dropping the ball] as a wide, but technically it doesn’t get counted as a shot.

“I’d leave it out when counting percentages for a player or a team — common sense would tell you it’s not an attempt on goal, so I wouldn’t count it as such.”

Carroll had a “cliched enough” introduction to GAA statistics. He was stuck in an airport and picked up Moneyball, and it fired his imagination.

He decided to analyse as many games as possible beginning in 2011; the only obstacle was the absence of data, which doesn’t exist in the GAA to the extent it does in other sports, notably baseball.

“GAA teams were collecting bits and pieces of information themselves but I got a couple of students on board then and examined the televised championship games that season.

“Then I approached the GAA and pointed out that information would be useful to them.”

He’s added in league games since last year and broadened his horizons from Gaelic football into hurling.

“It was really for my own interests, my own use. I didn’t want to start from a point of view that data would get rid of the need for a coach.”

True enough, particularly as he supplies many inter-county coaches with data. What they want isn’t what the GAA wants, or what the media wants, as he points out.

“I’m collecting the information in a kind of neutral way, but I deal with counties and the GAA, and what they want can be very different.

“What a team wants at half time and what the GAA wants in order to work on games development are two different things. Sometimes the recipient may not know why the information is useful. An inter-county football team may not know why it might be useful to know they had 175 handpasses in the first half, say, but my attitude to information is, ‘let’s collect it and see if it’s useful before we throw it out’.

“There’s a difference between what a team wants, what a governing body wants and what the media want. We’re still so early in GAA statistics, though, that you can’t turn around and say ‘that stat is useless’.

“So along with actually collecting the information, we’re trying to work out what’s useful and what’s not along the way.”

Individual teams can look for particular stats, he says.

“Every coach is an individual and they all look at games slightly differently, with their own particular interpretations,” says Carroll.

“90, 95% of what they want is the same, but there can be little differences.

“Take kick-outs. If a team doesn’t field the ball cleanly but wins the break, that might count as a successful kick-out for one manager, while another might only count it as a success if the pass after winning the break went to a team-mate. So sometimes even though it’s technically the same event, managers can view it in slightly different ways.”

Last week I spoke to Chris Anderson, author of The Numbers Game, and he suggested there wasn’t a killer stat which could “solve” soccer. Carroll is inclined to agree with him about football and hurling.

“I don’t think there’s a killer stat in the GAA,” he says. “Look at how Donegal and Dublin are playing, which is very different but which has been quite successful for both. I think Moneyball may have sold the wrong story in that sense — it’s a different sport and it doesn’t apply in GAA terms.

“I wish it were that easy, but it’s not.”