Middle muddleBy Peter Ryan
Tue 17 Jul, 2012THERE are two ways one could examine how the final critical centre bounce unfolded between the Gold Coast Suns and Richmond on Saturday night.
You could laud the Suns for getting it right in the moment that mattered, as they launched an all or nothing attack mission from the centre with just 25 seconds remaining.
Zac Smith won the tap, David Swallow hunted the ball and then Trent McKenzie kicked the ball deep into the Suns' surprisingly uncluttered forward 50.
Unheralded, yet vital to the clearance, was Dion Prestia's smother as Shaun Grigg kicked. More than anything, Prestia's desperate act proved the difference between the footy heading in Karmichael Hunt's direction instead of lobbing inside the Tigers' forward 50.
You could focus on that, or you could ask the question as to how the Tigers could concede a goal from a centre bounce in just 25 seconds.
After all the Tigers have been reasonable in that area this season, allowing the opposition to win the centre clearance just 43 per cent of the time (ranked 10th in the competition). They sit seventh in the competition for centre clearances, with a plus-12 head to head differential.
They were up against a team that sits 13th for conceding opposition clearances and 15th in the competition for centre clearances with a minus 24 differential.
On those figures alone, the odds favoured Richmond winning that last, crucial clearance, or at least neutralising the initial bounce to create a secondary stoppage (admittedly not a strong suit for the Tigers) to force precious seconds to elapse and allow others to crowd the space.
But looking at those clearance statistics in isolation ignores a key contributor to Saturday's eventual result: the respective starting four combinations assembled for that last bounce.
It's relevant, as current North Melbourne coach Brad Scott discovered when he researched the topic of centre clearances as Collingwood assistant coach leading into the 2009 season.
He found that who started in the centre was the most important variable when it came to determining how a team fared at centre clearances. Not structures, not hit-outs, not the state of the game. Who was in the square mattered most.
Unfortunately for Richmond, Saturday evening's dramatic finish provided more evidence to support that case.
With Trent Cotchin caught on the bench, Ivan Maric (and Nathan Foley) injured and Dustin Martin suspended, Richmond had Angus Graham, Brett Deledio, Shaun Grigg and Reece Conca in the middle with 25 seconds left.
As it was Graham's first game for the season that quartet had only contested one other centre clearance in 2012, a clearance they won earlier that evening against the Suns.
Neither of the club's most experienced centre bounce players, Cotchin (has won 32 centre clearances in 2012) nor Shane Tuck (at 41), was in the middle.
So of the Tigers' top four starters (the missing Martin has won 19 centre clearances this season), only Deledio (at 18) was in the square when the ball was bounced.
It was not an ideal situation with the game suddenly on the line. Compounding any potential for on-field uncertainty was the presence on the bench of skipper Chris Newman, who had been injured earlier in the quarter.
When the crucial ball was bounced, Deledio was standing on the defensive side of the stoppage acting as a net to catch what he expected to be a charging Gary Ablett. Graham, who had battled hard all night, was in the ruck while Conca guarded space and Prestia and Grigg hunted the ball and watched over Rischitelli.
No-one hampered Ablett's run.
The inexperienced Brandon Ellis was left on a wing, with two Suns players beside him. On the available footage, the talented youngster, playing just his 15th game, appeared uncertain what to do, waiting when he probably could have rushed in to create more congestion. He will have learned a valuable lesson as will many of his mates.
Deledio did his job stopping Ablett but when the Suns' Swallow, the man credited with the clearance, gathered and handballed he found Trent McKenzie, in space and on his favoured left side free of pressure.
Although he wasn't making any excuses after the game it was no wonder Richmond coach Damien Hardwick bemoaned the fact the Tigers could not quite get its centre bounce set up right for the last play.
He spoke with amazing clarity, as it would have hurt to explain what he had just seen because every coach finds a breakdown in structure harder to bear than skill errors.
However in this case, the inexperience on the ground made such a breakdown more likely. The 18 Tigers on the ground averaged just 62.72 games apiece.
While everyone wants to have a laugh at the Tigers' expense, this fact is critical to putting the events in perspective.
Of course, that would not make the result any easier to cop.
By contrast, the Suns were able to throw its second best centre square combination of Smith, Ablett, Michael Rischitelli and Prestia into the middle. That Suns quartet is its most experienced 2012 centre square combination having contested 17 centre bounces this season, winning 11, losing five and squaring one.
That's a good record, only bettered by a combination that would have included Hunt instead of Prestia. The combination that includes Hunt holds the AFL's best differential (+10) when it comes to centre clearances statistics involving the 50 most common combinations in the game.
The Suns appear to be throwing players through the centre this year to give them experience rather than having an A or B combination that steps forward in such moments. The combination would have been in there more by chance than design.
Harley Bennell, Josh Caddy or David Swallow could just as easily have replaced Prestia. However it's unlikely Ablett would have been sitting outside the square.
In the end with an ounce of luck the Tigers might have become the AFL's equivalent of jockey Luke Nolen, when he rode Black Caviar to within an inch of defeat in England, and got away with what happened.
But as Hardwick said, the Gods seemed to be conspiring against the Tigers.
Hunt was parked forward waiting to become just the 32rd man (Barry Hall did it twice) to have kicked a winning goal after the siren in an AFL game.
And that exciting 25 seconds that proved the Suns are coming became another learning opportunity most at Punt Road could have done without.
"It can go one of two ways from here: it can fracture us as a group or we can build on it and get back to where we know we can," Hardwick said.
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