Something that’s always felt sacred to the AFL is its acceptance of randomness. The centre bounce (RIP) was largely predictable, but the fact that it had to be contained within a circle signalled to the audience as early as possible in the game that this game lives on the margins of that predictability. It was a sign that the randomness of the bounce was acceptable as long as it lived within prescribed margins.
Games have been decided by what seem to the naked eye to be lucky or unlucky bounces. Did the bounce of the ball cost St. Kilda the 2010 Grand Final, when Steven Milne stood where, in 99% of outcomes, the ball could safely be predicted to go? Was he undone by a 1% outcome, the ball twice going to the only places he couldn’t get it and exert his willpower over it? Perhaps Steven Milne, who is not a ball understander, was undone in the same way anyone who doesn’t have mastery of a domain can be undone.
The truth is that the bounce of the ball only appears random to the human eye. To the ball, the bounce isn’t random. The ball, to the ball, bounces predictably. A soccer ball bounces predictably because the shape is predictable, and every surface of a circle rebounds off the ground the same way. Different surfaces of an ovoid ball bounce differently, but to the ovoid ball this is just how it moves through the world. To understand the different ways a ball will bounce- and I do mean will – one must understand that the ball will repeatedly bounce the same way if you can understand which part of the ball will hit the ground where.
Every player in the AFL understands this, at least to an extent. The centre bounce (again, RIP) is predictable, because the ball goes straight up when the fat side of the ball strikes the ground. I say every player understands this because every player bounces the same when they’re on the run – the ball hits the ground and returns to the hand because the player has mastery over the return angle of the ball. To understand the alleged randomness of the ball is just to apply this logic in other situations.
“The unpredictable bounce of a football is due to random variations in its orientation on impact. The angle of inclination introduces a strong bias in all bounce parameters for a football since the line of action of the normal reaction force, and hence the torque on the ball, depends on the ball inclination at impact”
Quoting directly from Rod Cross’ 2006 publication ‘Bounce of an oval shaped football there. In his abstract, he also says that “the bounce of an oval-shaped football may appear to be erratic, but it can be described by simple laws of physics”. In correspondence with him for this very piece, he tells me that although it is possible for someone to watch enough film to memorise these angles, if the ball is spinning rapidly it is nearly impossible to predict if the ball will point forwards or backwards when it lands.
While this is a key variable for the ball’s continued movement, I believe that if you understand where the ball is going to go once it bounces, reducing the outcome to merely two variables would provide a sizeable competitive advantage.
It is at this stage that I would like to introduce my muse for this piece, recently delisted ball understander par excellence, Tom Mitchell. And then I wish to shoo him away. But keep him in your minds until I introduce him again.
I referred to Steven Milne earlier as someone who was undone as someone who doesn’t have mastery of a domain can be undone. I would invite you to conceptualise what master of one’s domain looks like when the domain is understanding the bounce of the ball.
For me, understanding the bounce of the ball fundamentally changes the scale of the game. In the clip of the bounce, Milne is done by a ball that bounces behind him, and in chasing the ball, is undone by the ball bouncing sharply to his right. In both occasions, he’s on the back foot. He’s reacting to the bounce of the ball as it happens. If he was a true ball understander, he would position himself slightly to the right, knowing ahead of time where the ball would land.
The proactivity of the ball understander goes beyond merely this Steven Milne moment. To know where the ball will be, rather than knowing where the ball is and waiting for it to bounce, provides a competitive advantage.
Time to bring that muse back!
Over and over and over again, Tom Mitchell is where the ball will be. Tom Mitchell might have read Rod Cross’ paper. As a Sydney supporter, it’s tempting to reduce Mitchell’s output to that of a pure handball merchant, someone who averaged a whopping 22 (rounding up) handballs per game in 2017. Only three players in that Hawthorn team averaged more total disposals that season than Mitchell did handballs. The numbers are absurd. He’s a vacuum disguised as a man.
But this is the price of being the pre-eminent ball understander of our time. The man who knows where the ball will be is the man cursed to be permanently only a half step ahead of the ensuing wolves, players whose reactive nature means that their goal switches immediately from Get-Ball to Get-Man.
Tom Mitchell, in that scenario, is eternally doomed to be the Man who is Got. Like Prometheus’ eternal torment for giving man fire, Tom Mitchell is forever on the edge of being tackled. This pack is to Mitchell as the Eagle is to Prometheus.
Darwin’s finches are the classical example of adaptive radiation – the evolutionary idea that things evolve in response to how they’re able to survive in your environment. The natural evolution of this torment is the development of elite hand quickness, as there is nothing to be gained from understanding the ball if your next move is to be tackled and create a stoppage. The memory of him as a handball merchant is a tainted one, owing as it does to the handballing being a necessary adaptive evolutionary trait.
In that 2017 season, he averaged 6.23 clearances, likely owing to the statistical quirk that a clearance is “credited to the player who has the first effective disposal in a chain that clears the stoppage area”. The prototypical clearance in your mind’s eye is probably the booming kick clear of the area, but the stoppage is credited more often than not to the player who made that kick possible, another direct consequence of the sheer number of handballs Tom Mitchell was in a position to issue.
Sports, in general, are making moves to curtail randomness at a larger scale. Seasons are longer, individual quirks are being coached out in favour of strict systems, chancy opportunists who exploit structural weaknesses wind up having those exploits turned into movies that star Brad Pitt and get absorbed into the zeitgeist. Players who accumulate disposals at the rate Tom Mitchell does aren’t often praised as mavericks, because to be a maverick is to oppose the establishment and to accumulate disposals is, to the AFL fan, what the establishment requires. What this reductive discourse misses, is that there’s an art to his accumulation that’s unsung, that unsexy ability to always be where the ball is about to appear.
I contend chiefly that the ability of Tom Mitchell to find the footy so often during his career goes beyond luck. Anyone, over a long enough time frame, will be in the right place at the right time for long enough to benefit from the bounce of an ‘unpredictable’ ball, but Tom Mitchell has done this often enough that this ability transcends luck.
The aforementioned Prometheus, he of the eternal torment with the eagle and the liver, was also the Titan of Foresight. I would argue that Tom Mitchell’s status as our pre-eminent ovoid understander makes him the AFL’s Prometheus. Is his legacy, the knowledge that the ball can be comprehended, his gift of fire to the football-watching public?
