Before hokball there was hackball - when the Hawks set the record for most clangers in a match

3 years ago today (5/6/2022) Hawthorn achieved a mighty feat - posting a record 93 clangers in their round 12 clash against Collingwood.

As it turns out this was a pretty costly time to do it, as they wound up losing by a mere points. Let’s revisit that messy match on its clangiversary.

48 of Hawthorn’s 93 clangers were from disposals (32 kicks, 11 handballs, and 5 ground kicks), while another 26 came from free kicks conceded. I don’t have as reliable data on the remaining 19 which would be a mix of 50 metre penalties, unforced errors, debits (spoiling a teammate’s mark), and dropped marks.

Let’s have a quick look at the raw numbers first

Raw numbers don’t tell us the whole story. For both the disposal clangers and the frees against I’ve got a reasonable amount of info so lets plot them out.

A couple of things stick out really badly here. The kick backwards into the centre square that ends up gathered by De Goey, the three handballs intercepted by Collingwood in their F50, and the hack ground kick that leads to an uncontested mark by Jack Crisp just outside the arc.

As you’d expect, the free kicks given away in Hawthorn’s defensive half are more costly - with five of them resulting in a Collingwood score either in that chain or the subsequent one.

For next week’s edition of This Week In Football I’ll look at putting something together on how this game stacks up compared to others (Collingwood tied the record the following year against Adelaide). Of the 25 highest clanger games, I’ve got this kind of data for 19 of them so we’ll be able to look at where and how they happen in a good bit of detail.