AFL 2021: Adelaide Crows the most accurate team from set-shot snaps
Adelaide is an improving team, but there is one key skill the Crows execute better than every other club in the competition. See the stats.
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Two of the AFL’s most promising key forwards have emerged as the Jekyll and Hyde of the set-shot snap fad.
Kicks around the body from set shots remain polarising, particularly among traditionalists, but their popularity has surged since the brilliant Steve Johnson first experimented with them at Geelong in the early 2000s.
Coleman Medal frontrunner Harry McKay has attempted double as many as anyone else this year and is evidence of how devastating the technique can be if it’s executed well.
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McKay’s dependence on the set-shot snap owes, in part, to his relative struggles with the traditional approach – he sometimes even uses it for in-front attempts – but his success can’t be denied.
Champion Data has laid bare the big Blue’s success with goalkicking’s dark art, analysing the expected accuracy in percentage for every shot then comparing it with the actual result.
He is outperforming the AFL number-cruncher’s predictive formula by a league-best 27.1 per cent this year on his 19 attempts (15.4), placing him ahead of Jack Riewoldt, Jordan De Goey and Jason Castagna.
McKay’s Western Bulldogs counterpart, Aaron Naughton, on the other hand, has some work to do to match his sharpshooting ways.
Naughton, too, is displaying an appetite for set-shot snaps, but has managed a modest 2.6 for his efforts, almost 34 per cent worse than Champion Data expected his accuracy to be.
The sample sizes remain much smaller than the more-accepted, straight-on set shot, but there are six players with at least five set-shot snaps going at 80 per cent or better.
Josh Bruce (75.8 per cent on 33 attempts) and Lance Franklin (70.8 per cent on 24) are the most accurate in 2021 on the conventional set shot among the top-25 qualifying players.
Adelaide forwards coach James Rahilly, an ex-teammate and coach of Johnson at the Cats, is an avid supporter of the set-shot snap, particularly when players are kicking on acute angles.
The Crows, as a team, are the AFL’s best exponent this season by some way, having nailed 11 of their 12 attempts, which is 42.7 per cent better than expected.
The combined efforts of Taylor Walker, Shane McAdam, James Rowe, Lachie Murphy, Darcy Fogarty and Ned McHenry place them almost 20 per cent ahead of the next-best clubs, Geelong and Melbourne.
“Obviously, watching the games and coding goalkicking, I was fairly aware we were quite accurate,” Rahilly said.
“I’m a massive believer that it’s the right technique (for those types of shots). If you’ve done the work; there’s less room for error with the side of the foot than the front of the foot.
“You’ve got more of your foot to work with. There’s a very basic system we go through, but a lot of the forwards – the guys who kick goals a lot – still like to have their own touch with it.”
Rahilly said there were no hard and fast rules on how or when players executed the skill, only an expectation that anything attempted in a match must first be practised at training.
There’s also no pressure to have to use it.
In fact, Shane McAdam utilises the technique only on his right foot, whereas on the other side he prefers checkside attempts to a left-footed set-shot snap.
It’s hard to argue with his method, given he’s a perfect three from three this season.
Forwards development coach Matthew Wright is also heavily involved in the goalkicking process, but Rahilly said the Crows benefited from having several excellent set-shot exponents.
Where Rahilly said they still needed work was in their general-play shots at goal.
“Generally, the guys we do have are pretty good at set shots, so I’d hope we’d be up there, but it’s freakish accuracy this year when you look at it,” he said.
“I don’t know if we can keep to that, but ‘Fog’ is a really good set shot – he’s working on his shots on the run – and there haven’t been many better than ‘Tex’.
“James Rowe and Shane have that knack of getting it, and Riley (Thilthorpe) is quite a talented kid, too, who in time is probably going to be quite an accurate shot at goal.”
Goal-kicking whisperer David Wheadon, who worked with Johnson and many others, has a theory on why there is lingering trepidation about set-shot snaps.
“Anything that’s progressive and new is usually unpopular at the start,” Wheadon said.
Either way, more and more AFL footballers are adopting the technique.
Champion Data started tracking set-shot snaps in 2002 – Johnson’s debut season – and there were only 108 for the entire season. By 2018, there were almost four times as many.
Brisbane’s Joe Daniher even launched one from barely inside 50 against Melbourne last week, after which his coach Chris Fagan was asked whether he was OK with him doing that.
After a pause, Fagan delivered the perfect retort to the naysayers.
“I let Joe make those decisions himself. He’s the best judge of his own kick.”
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