Goals goals goals (also behinds) - AFLW

Written By Emlyn Breese

Having discovered a few new data sources, I’ve been focusing on AFLW data a bit lately. Partly because Melbourne’s performance and overall vibe is far less depressing in the W, partly because many datasets run across the entire 9 seasons of the competition.

This post focuses on a few things I’ve been able to draw out from score progression data in AFLW from the first match up to the end of the 9th Home & Away season in 2024.


Time in front

Time in front is a metric commonly used across sport. Let’s cast our nets broader than a single game. Below I’ve ranked the teams based on how much of their total gametime (in home and away games, not finals) they’ve spent in the lead.

The composition of the top four shouldn’t be much of a surprise to long-term followers of the league although the order might be. Leading up to this post I ran a twitter article asking who people thought would be ranked #1, with Adelaide being the #1 choice. This is understandable given they’re in the lead on premierships, but as we’ll see a bit later they haven’t been without their dips.

There’s a clear gap between the top 4 and the rest on this metric. We can see a fairly even tapering off through the remaining teams right down to West Coast.

Now let’s look at individual seasons, again only for Home and Away games. In the below graphs we’ve just isolated time in front, and I’ve highlighted the team that would go on to win the premiership in each year (2020 having no premiership awarded after the season was abandoned due to the COVID-19 pandemic.)

As I mentioned, you can see Adelaide has a fair bit of up and down there. Their characteristic more than anything else has been winning when it matters.

As you’d expect there’s a relatively strong link between time in front and ultimate success. The highest time in front of a H&A season predicting four of the seven premiers so far and a runner-up.

The single most dominant performance by this metric was Melbourne’s 2022 (s7) effort, leading from the first score to the final siren in 7 of their 10 matches.

On the flip side the worst performance is clearly Richmond’s maiden campaign. In their winless 2020 they held the lead for 9m 4s in the first quarter against the Suns in Round 2, and two periods of 1m19s and 1m27s against Geelong in Round 4.

We can also look at changes from season to season.

The biggest season-on-season drop comes from the Bulldogs from their premiership in 2018 to 2019, and it’s one they’ve never fully recovered from. This is no real surprise, as they lost Emma Kearney (Club B&F winner 2017+18, Coaches Association MVP 2018, League B&F 2018) after the 2018 season, and this was compounded with the loss of captain and leading goalkicker Katie Brennan after the 2019 season.

Adelaide provides both a dip and a bounce, with a poor 2020 season sandwiched between strong showings. Adelaide was perhaps uniquely impacted by COVID-19 public health restrictions, as portions of the list were Northern Territory based and the bulk South Australia based. This was compounded by Erin Phillips, clearly the dominant player of the game at the time, playing only two of a possible six matches as she returned from an ACL injury.

Other than Adelaide’s rebound, the next best season-on-season improvement is the current McLelland Trophy winning Hawthorn squad. A lot of reasons have been ascribed to their rise but I’m firmly of the belief it rests largely on taking Eliza West and Casey Sherriff away from us at Casey Fields.

Game by game

Let’s zoom in now to looking at individual games. Tony Corke over on MatterOfStats has done some super interesting work in trying to categorise archetypes of games in AFLM based on how the margin progresses over time (here and here for some examples).

I’m not going to do anything as complicated as Tony has done (maybe at a later date, no promises though). Instead I’m going to try to identify close or interesting games by a couple of parameters.

First, and simplest, most lead changes.

The most lead changes in an AFLW game to date has been in Round 7 this year, Richmond vs Geelong with 11.

The top 4 is rounded out by GWS v Hawthorn (R8 2022 (s7)), Collingwood v Adelaide (R7 2017), and GWS v St Kilda (R5 2022 (s6)).

On the flip side, of the 582 AFLW games played to date just under a third have seen the loser never in front on the scoreboard.

If we look at individual quarters there have been two occasions where the lead has changed 5 times in a quarter. Q1 of Fremantle v GWS (R2 2022 (s6)) and the 4th quarter of the aforementioned Richmond v Geelong game.


Another thing to look for would be particularly intense passages of play. Where have the most lead changes occurred in the shortest period of time?

The shortest time between two lead changes is 42 seconds in Round 6 2023. Jasmine Garner gave the Roos the first behind of the game at 0:39 before Aine Tighe put the Dockers in front with a goal at 1:21.

That same section of play also gives us the quickest three lead changes, when Tahlia Randall returns the Roos to the lead another 97 seconds later.

For the quickest four lead changes in succession we go to the second quarter of the 2023 Preliminary Final between Brisbane and Geelong.

  • Jacqueline Parry goals for a 1 point Geelong lead @ 13:04

  • Orla O’Dwyer restores a 5 point Brisbane lead @ 14:39

  • Chloe Scheer puts Geelong back in front @ 15:56

  • Dakota Davidson goals for Brisbane @ 17:54



Let’s also have a look at where a team has snatched an unlikely win - represented by the least time spent in front by the eventual winner.

There’s a clear winner here - it’s Fremantle vs Melbourne in Round 4 2024 in which Aisling McCarthy kicked a goal after the siren with the dockers never having led during the match.

The dataset I go off has this recorded as holding the lead for three seconds of game time - I think representing the gap for the umpire to signal the goal, but common sense dictates us to record this as a flat 0% time in front for the win.

The next closest also came this year in Round 10 with Gemma Houghton snatching victory for the Power at the absolute death. While Freo had tied the scores up against Melbourne for a bit, the Power had trailed ever since 2:21 into the first quarter.

Player by Player

That brings us nicely to our final section on player by player breakdowns.

Let’s start off with which players have kicked their teams into the lead most frequently.

With that kick last week Gemma Houghton (17 times with a goal and 5 times with a behind) tied Caitlin Greisier (16 x goal, 6 x behind) - leading the competition in having put their team into the lead on 22 occasions.

Within the one game, on 5 occasions a player has taken the lead three times in a single game:

  • Three of Sarah Perkins four goals resulted in a lead change for the Crows in Round 7 2017.

  • Each of Richelle Cranston’s goals put Melbourne in front in Round 1 2018.

  • Teagan Cunningham was responsible for all three times Melbourne took the lead in Round 3 2019.

  • Jacqueline Parry put the Cats in front three times in Round 7 2024.

  • Katie Brennan put Richmond ahead of the Bombers three times in their draw in Round 9 2024.

The last thing I want to look at today is career goals progression.

Eight players have held (individually or tied) the record for most career goals in AFLW at some point during the competition.

Jasmine Garner, Darcy Vescio, and Lauren Arnell were the first three goal scorers in the competition in Round 1 2017.

Darcy Vescio kicked another three that day taking the outright lead, leaving Garner (8 minutes 53 seconds) and Arnell (1 minute and 22 seconds) with modest reigns.

The most recent change is Kate Hore reclaiming the title from Danielle Ponter at 2:02 last Saturday.

And below you can find the progression over time. I tried for a long time to get it reflecting changes within matches, but Flourish was having absolutely none of that (ended up being too many individual points in time I think).

That feels like about enough for now. Hopefully this serves as a fun distraction in some quite shitty times. If you’ve got suggestions for things you’d like me to look at in future the best place to hit me up currently is probably on twitter (although who knows how long that will last).

Emlyn Breese
Previous

Introducing Territory Charts
Next

Graphing AFLW Player movement (v2)