As the AFL’s coaches bury themselves in stats sheets to explain away early-season results, it might pay to look far closer at the impact of momentum

It’s taken 158 long winters, but the AFL world has almost finished figuring out that football is not a ball sport but a game of momentum, involving a ball. In the first three rounds of the new season, scarcely a post-match interview has gone by without the player or coach referencing the momentum of the contest – how they rode it to victory, or how it did them in.

The “m” term has crept into the footy lexicon over the past three years. Recently it’s been every special comments man’s go-to observation.

In interviews after Collingwood’s Round 2 snatch-and-grab job on Richmond at the MCG, Adam Treloar and Trent Cotchin mentioned it. After the first round, Sydney’s Luke Parker noted how Buddy Franklin got the momentum rolling for his team and the Swans never handed it up. On Saturday there was Swans coach John Longmire explaining how they wrested it off the threatening GWS Giants.

With the apparent exception of Fremantle, where Ross Lyon holds the line on the formula for success being “method plus effort” (that’s so 2009) it seems that players are a little less inclined to reach for explanations from the game’s statistics – clearance differentials, tackle counts, oscores from turnovers, or any other “KPI” that has taken an assistant coach’s fancy.

Let’s be frank. These things never explained the game.

As football turned professional in the past 25 years, its coaches and their acolytes began to treat the stats sheets like holy scriptures, as though somewhere among these abstract categories you could find the secret to football, if only you looked hard enough.

The problem is, the statistic that seems to explain the outcome of one game – cleverly demonstrated for Fox Footy on Kingy’s telestrator – fails to account for the next one.

It hasn’t stopped some coaches trying. After Saturday’s losses, Richmond coach Damien Hardwick (“Guess who’s the No1 kicking team? We are!”) and Collingwood coach Nathan Buckley (“We were plus-18 on contested possession”) were baffled by how they could lose so comprehensively with such numbers. Buckley later settled on his team’s lack of forward pressure (now to be known as “positive territory turnovers”) as reason for defeat at the hands of St Kilda. Well, a coach has to come up with something.

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More tackles inside 50? What forward can manage that while simultaneously working up to support an under-siege defence, and trying to make field position for a heavy-legged midfield whose every disposal is under intense pressure?

Analysing the stats sheet for the secret to football is like studying the words in religious texts expecting to find the meaning of life. You’ll miss the forest for the trees. The irony of footy statistics is that they seem so real, so black and white, but in fact are illusory. The world is not black and white, especially not the football world. It’s multi shades of grey, and stats rarely capture it.

One thing is real, though. Psychological momentum is real. It runs every game. And understanding its ways can spoil many of the myths that underpin Aussie rules football.

Among them are the other routine explanations for victory and defeat – short breaks, travel requirements, heavy grounds the previous week (yes, seriously), rotation differentials, even good old “lack of effort” – all of which can be seen for what they are: nebulous, illogical, convenient, unprovable fallacies.

None of them matter to your performance if momentum is on your side. Several games this round provided masterclasses on the topic: the wind-assisted swings in the Roos-Demons game; the finish to the Hawks-Bulldogs game; the depleted Saints’ third-quarter surge.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Once momentum swung St Kilda’s way against Collingwood, not even the loss of key forwards Nick Riewoldt and Paddy McCartin could stop their third-quarter charge. Photograph: Adam Trafford/AFL Media/Getty Images

You would think that in the professional sporting era such a fundamental force – the primary force in sport – would have been examined to death by now; picked apart, reconstructed, personally rebranded (“Hawks footy” or something) and have become the pivot of match analysis. But no, we’ve been anchored in a past age when the extent of coherence on the topic was Lou Richards’ cry: “They’ve got the run-on!” It never occurred to us then that this strange “run-on” phenomenon was worth studying. That it might contain secrets to success.

If we’d looked at other sports the right way, we would have seen it at work in them too. We would have recognised cricket for what it is: a game of momentum, involving a bat and ball. We could have understood Jimmy Anderson’s astonishing six-wicket barrage in the third Ashes Test as a powerful run-on, and the Australian batting collapse as having nothing to do with technical deficiencies against a swinging Duke ball but instead about the psychology of negative momentum.

If we’d looked at tennis, we’d have seen a game of momentum requiring a racquet, ball and court. Think of Pat Cash and Lleyton Hewitt at Wimbledon, riding theirs all the way through the tournament, or Jana Novotna losing it dramatically when on the cusp of victory. If we’d thought about golf, and Greg Norman … need I go on?

Psychological momentum is the basis of every competitive pursuit, from sport to business to politics. (If you doubt its importance in political campaigns, think of Donald Trump. Or Tony Abbott last year. Or even Malcolm Turnbull, Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten right now.)

Who knows what has distracted the under-developed field of sports psychology this past decade, but outside of several research institutions in the USA it has been nowhere on this topic. Whatever the psychologists employed by AFL clubs have been talking about all this time, it hasn’t been the psychology of competitive sport. (And given the amount of psychological distress inside the industry, it’s not unreasonable to wonder what they have been talking about.)

I’ve written at length about the researched effects of positive and negative momentum, and of the chronic misinterpretation of the game and its participants that flow from our inability to recognise them. If you read a little Eastern philosophy, you might think of momentum as the qi of the contest. That might seem a little esoteric, until you come to realise that the emerging science explains just about everything about how games, and seasons, pan out.

Nathan Buckley likes to refer to “belief” as the currency of football. With each goal, the winning team adds a deposit to its bank of belief, while making a withdrawal from the opposition’s account. He puts it this way: “You either take belief away from the opposition and feed your own (by scoring) or the equation goes the other way.”

When you listen, Buckley talks a lot about belief. Asked to critique the Western Bulldogs coach-of-the-moment Luke Beveridge on 1116 SEN’s Coaches Box on Friday night, Buckley first offered that he thought the Bulldogs were playing with great belief.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest More than most AFL coaches, Collingwood’s Nathan Buckley refers to “belief” as a strong currency in football. Photograph: Michael Dodge/Getty Images

In fact, belief is the currency of momentum. Players must believe in their coach and his game plan (another holy script) and of course in themselves. The less belief in the vault, the quicker that negative momentum can take hold and the harder it is to shake. The more belief players have, the more resilient in its face.

Everyone who has played sport knows how it feels to find yourself in the positive zone: the sheer exhilaration that courses through body and mind when the energy of the game runs your way. When the ball is bouncing for you, exertion is effortless, skills are pristine, you’re getting love from the umpires, the approving roar of the crowd becomes festive, and scoring is suddenly easy. Everything just clicks. This is positive momentum, and participation in sport at such moments is pure joy… for you.

But there’s a flipside. Your tiring opponents are not enjoying this. Their distress is directly proportional to your elation. As they try desperately to reverse the flow of the game, they lose team cohesion (“start to play like individuals”), begin to misspend their energy (“lack intensity”), seem always one step short of the contest (“not switched on”) and overplay what opportunities they do have (“skills letting us down”), leading to one calamitous mistake after the other. Their fans cannot bear it. They depart early – emotionally and literally.

But while experienced sportspeople know the spirit-sapping frustration that grips mind and body as an opponent steals the march, they also understand that this state is impermanent; it switches quickly with the right triggers.

Indeed, positive and negative momentum are not two different things but opposing poles of the one psychology. It’s the yin-yang principle: every phenomenon has two faces, each of which contains the seed of the other. Reality is like this. We notice the black and white extremes, but in between is a great deal of grey (often known in a football context as the “arm wrestle”).

One extraordinary aspect of momentum is the way that it infects the minds of everyone in its presence: not just participants but observers too. So while watching a contest in which one set of players surges to victory high on positive momentum, we feel as they do, that they are the superior players with the greater skills, and resolve, and fitness, and tactics, and coaches.

Look at the match reports. All of the winners are stars. Gods of the game. Everything about them is bright and rosy and positive. The coach “outcoached” his opposite number. The fitness guy is a genius. Their recruiters nailed it. We praise them to the heavens. We’ll confidently tip them the next week.

As for their opposition, they are losers. Duds, fakers, false prophets, moral bankrupts, miserable failures. Their captain lacked leadership. Their game plan stank. They ignored their coach (he’s from a different generation) or his game plan. The best that reporters can muster is that a handful “tried hard”. We cannot imagine them winning next week; the cause is lost. We record all this in tabloid black and white.

So momentum is a force that extends outside the contest itself, and infects all who observe it: crowds, TV audiences, entire clubs and their boards and, yes, sports writers.

And gloom settles on the losing outfit like a heavy fog. It can last a week, a month, the best part of a season. A protracted fogs ends a coaching career. Only a bout of positive momentum can lift it.

To revisit that already iconic Collingwood-Richmond result of a week earlier when the Magpies rode the momentum to snatch a one-point victory, imagine if that game had finished five seconds earlier, when the Tigers still led. How different would the reportage have been?

Thrashing around for explanation for the Tigers’ collapse, the analysts lashed the captain, Trent Cotchin, for his lack of leadership. He had 38 possessions in that game, 12 in the last quarter. Had it finished a handful of seconds earlier, those same loud voices would have said Cotchin “led from the front”. His opposite number Scott Pendlebury had two ineffective possessions in the last quarter, but no explanation surfaced as to how this constituted match-winning leadership.

The next frontier inside the game, in my opinion, will be a more thorough understanding of momentum: how to get it, how not to lose it, and how to arrest your opposition’s.

Two years ago Geelong’s Jimmy Bartel revealed to Inside Football some ways the Cats, who have been a little ahead of the game here, tried to harness momentum (which amounted to focusing on your skills when you have it, and on winning possession at all costs when you don’t).

Increasingly more players and coaches are talking about it. I’m prepared to declare that its time has come. The AFL is getting with the program. It’s a phenomenon gaining momentum.

Mick Ellis writes and edits for Inside Football magazine.