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Which Australian sport produces the best athletes? Part Six: The final results

The AFL sits atop the pile of Australian sports. (AAP Image/Dan Himbrechts)
Expert
3rd July, 2017
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7287 Reads

After poring over all of the numbers and all of the analysis, it’s time to crown a winner. Which of the five major Australian sports produces the best natural athletes?

As a reminder, I am making these judgements in partnership with ex-NRL coach Rohan Smith. I’m the numbers guy, he’s the real world guy.

Together, we’ve discussed and debated where AFL, cricket, rugby league, rugby union and football rank relative to each other on four key attributes of athletic performance.

Those are:

Agility: a measure of an athlete’s required evasiveness, ability to change direction and be aware of those around them;
Endurance: the length of time an athlete is required to perform at their peak, in a game and over the course of a season;
Power: how explosive an athlete needs to be, in both speed and strength terms, over and above the ‘resting’ state of play;
Speed: how fast a player is required to move around the field, both in sprints and general play.

It was a tough task, because the five sports are all remarkably different.

Cricket is a skills-based game, albeit one that requires power and endurance. While the rugby codes share similarities, as time has gone on, they’ve evolved to become vastly different sports; league is all about power, where union is strength-based.

Football and AFL are often the two lead combatants in the code wars, but share a need for spatial awareness, endurance and skill execution – although again, they are drastically different sports.

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But that’s the point. What Rohan and I have sought to do this series is make judgements on the basis of the best available facts, data and information.

Each sport was given a points ranking based on its performance in each area; the highest-ranked sport in each field would be given one point and the lowest given five, with the aim to finish with the lowest score. The best possible score was four, the worst was 20.

Let’s go through each area and sport line by line.

Agility

It came down to the two 360 degree sports in our assessment of agility. Ultimately, it was the only piece of quantitative (ish) evidence we could rely on to split the five sports.

AFL and football are played with a player’s entire orbit as fair game, where the rugby codes are played mostly face up and cricket’s interactions are highly regimented.

What gave it to Aussie rules at the end of the day was the need for players to be agile in an environment of strength-based tackling as well as in open space. Football requires far more of a focus on the open-play aspect in comparison.

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Charlie Cameron Adelaide Crows Showdown AFL 2015

(AAP Image/Ben Macmahon)

“Agility is a vital ingredient in every sport,” says Rohan.

“AFL got the nod due to the frequency of change in direction and the amount of acceleration and deceleration required. The unpredictability of deflections and the bounce of the odd-shaped ball also makes it more reactive and less predictable than the other sports.”

We made a judgement that rugby league required more agility than rugby union, mostly on account of union’s repeated phases of rucks and mauls compared to league players having more repeated moments of dodging, weaving and deceiving. Cricket came in last.

Endurance

This was a no-brainer: AFL requires the most endurance of the five sports assessed.

There was some conjecture in the beginning between AFL and cricket, given we are assessing endurance on the basis of an individual game as well as over the course of a season.

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A full-time member of the Australian Test cricket team could be expected to be plying his trade for more than 50 days a year, on his feet for up to six hours a day, plus all of the work that goes into training and preparation. An AFL player’s year is over in up to 26 two-hour bursts, plus training and preparation.

Ultimately though, Rohan, as a professional sports coach, marvelled at the endurance abilities of AFL athletes.

“The sheer volume of high-speed running in AFL trumps the other codes, particularly when you combine it with the collisions, tackles, agility, skill execution and jumping required. The size of the pitch is a major contributor.

“That said, cricket has the far greater mental endurance requirement.”

We ranked the other sports mostly in order of the time they play on game day: football, rugby league, then rugby union.

The peak professional Australian seasons of rugby league and football are deceptively similar in length; the A-League runs for 27 rounds plus finals, the NRL 26 rounds plus finals. Rugby union is done in 17 rounds plus finals, largely due to union’s penchant for international showdowns.

Power

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Again, this one is pretty obvious. Rugby union wins it, ahead of rugby league, with AFL a relatively-close-but-not-really-close third.

This assessment came down to the need to include strength into a measure of power. If the assessment was based solely on power as we’ve defined it here, cricket would come out on top – every action in cricket (batting, bowling and fielding) is a power action.

But because strength and mass and the ability to physically overwhelm come into it, the rugby codes reign supreme.

“Rugby league requires way more strength at speed than union, but union has more time under strength,” says Rohan.

“The strength component of power is a dominant factor in the 15-man game for scrums, stripping the ball and so on, and there’s no beating the brute strength requirement of union scrums.”

As we discussed in the two rugby assessments, union requires its players to be physically large and strong to move the opposition with pushing motions; league is more about mass for repeat collisions. We’re splitting hairs in a way, but union comes out on top.

Dane Haylett-Petty and Michael Hooper tackle Waisake Naholo.

(Photo by Tim Anger)

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Speed

Speed is again a very subjective judgement. If we had the time, resources and contacts, we’d love to watch the fastest player in each of the codes face off in a few 40-metre sprints.

Rohan and I made this call on the basis of how important speed is to the general requirements to be a peak athlete in each sport. It’s not particularly important for rugby union, somewhat important to rugby league and cricket, and very important to AFL and football.

What splits the two was the requirements in general play. Rohan was of the view that a lot of football movements were jogging and half-paced running, where Aussie rules requires its players to be constantly moving between jogging and sprints. In that environment, speed is a real asset.

“The size of the pitch in AFL enables players to get to high speeds more often than football,” says Rohan.

“It’s position dependent. Protecting a bigger field against speed is more difficult than doing so on a smaller field!”

I can see the argument on both sides. Footballers often find themselves trying to outrun an opponent to chase a through ball, or to sprint and break a line to create an opportunity. In the end, I defaulted to the man who does this stuff for a living.

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The results!

At the end of the ranking, one sport comes out clearly on top: AFL, with a score of six out of 20, only two away from a perfect result. It was rated by Rohan and I as the number one sport on agility, endurance and speed, and third on power.

In second place is football, which was runner-up to AFL for agility and speed, third for endurance, and fourth for power, giving it a final score of 11. One point further back was rugby league, which ranked second on power, third on agility and speed, and fourth on endurance.

Rugby union was fourth with 14, with the need for hefty players making it difficult for the code to score highly anywhere other than power, where it finished first.

And bringing up the rear is cricket, which, despite drastic improvements since the days of David Boon’s in-flight drinking efforts, remains the athletic minnow of the major Australian sporting codes. Cricket wound up with 17 points.

Here’s the full results table:

AFL Cricket Rugby League Rugby Union Football
Agility 1 5 3 4 2
Endurance 1 2 4 5 3
Power 3 5 2 1 4
Speed 1 5 3 4 2
Total 6 17 12 14 11
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That’s it! It’s been a lot of fun learning about the different athletic traits of the five major sports with Rohan. Now the real debate begins…

The full series
» Part One: AFL
» Part Two: Cricket
» Part Three: Rugby league
» Part Four: Rugby union
» Part Five: Football
» Part Six: Final Results

This series is sponsored by by POWERADE, fuelling rivalry through the POWERADE POWERSCORE. The Powerade Powerscore, developed in conjunction with the New South Wales Institute of Sport, allows you to compare yourself to mates and elite athletes.

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