Defensive KPI's assessing how we protect our goal

Defending is much more than just how many turnovers you forces or how many blocks you manage to get. In this piece, I hope to offer you some KPI's that can be used to asses our defensive play. Before I go into detail I would like to highlight that you probably measure what you need without knowing that you do. If you are tracking the opposition's attacks, shooting and possession statistics you can invert your attack measures to give you a picture of how your defence is performing. Over time like any measure, it will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a team while defending. Doing this alone will give you an excellent picture of your defensive abilities without asking you to track any different activities on the pitch. With that said, let's get into more specific KPI's that you can use when examining your defending. Defending is much more than just how many turnovers you forces or how many blocks you manage to get. In this piece, I hope to offer you some KPI's that can be used to asses our defensive play. Before I go into detail I would like to highlight that you probably measure what you need without knowing that you do. If you are tracking the opposition's attacks, shooting and possession statistics you can invert your attack measures to give you a picture of how your defence is performing. Over time like any measure, it will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses as a team while defending. Doing this alone will give you an excellent picture of your defensive abilities without asking you to track any different activities on the pitch. With that said, let's get into more specific KPI's that you can use when examining your defending. Tackle Count Several teams will track a tackle count. It is often used as a rudimentary way to examine the work rate of a team and identify what effort goes in off the ball. It is important if using this metric not to take it in the literal sense. Hurries, pressure, blocks, can all be considered as a way of putting an opposition player under pressure. If you want this to reflect pressure and work rate I would advise including these. Thus my ultimate definition of this would be the number of times physical pressure is applied to the ball carrier. Another way of looking at this in more detail is considering if the tackles or pressures were successful. This identifies how effective we are at applying pressure to opposition ball carriers. Forced Turnovers

Turnovers are a statistic tracked at every level but some are more valuable than others. A defender who intercepts a lazy pass to nobody vs a defender who strips a forward of possession is two very different actions. Thus it is unfair to pencil them both as turnovers. As part of my post-game analysis, I will review every turnover in the game, and examine whether or not, the defenders forced the opposition into the turnover, or whether it was a careless mistake. A turnover can be forced in many ways, it can be a tackle, it can be a pressurised pass, it can be a sweeper leaving space to double mark the recipient of a kick pass. These are just some of many examples. After reviewing all turnovers I calculated the percentage of turnovers that were forced to highlight how impactful our defending was in terms of affecting the opposition's play. Rather than counting a simple total turnover, we can examine to what extent our pressure and defensive tactics worked. You could put the forced turnovers as a percentage of total possessions of the opposition to identify how much disruption our defending is causing to their entire game plan. Pressure Score

This is a rating that measures how effective we are at defending our own goal. To calculate the pressure score we count how many turnovers we win inside our own 45 per every 10 opposition attacks. The higher the output the more effective we are at defending in our scoring zone. It is important to only include turnovers that were won inside the scoring zone that we are defending otherwise this statistic will not reflect how well we defend inside our own 45. Turnovers won in our forward line and even midfield would distort our assessment. Defensive Stop Rates

I use this as a way to measure how effective we are at preventing our opposition scoring. It takes into account, shots that are missed, potentially due to pressure, blocks and saves as well as turnovers won in the scoring zone. It is calculated as the % of Opposition attacks without conceding a score. The higher this rating the tighter our defence is. The flaw with this statistic is that due to the nature of the calculation it will include misses that were poor technique by the opposition. Inverting the attacking efficiency of a team allows us to calculate these stop rates and what is essentially our defensive efficiency. Defensive Composure

While defending the scoring zone it is important not to concede cheap frees. In today's game, the majority of club and county teams have at least one dead-ball specialist who is consistent. Thus it is in every defence's interests not to give the opposition any momentum with tap over scores. We can assess how disciplined we are as a defensive unite by calculating defensive composure. This can be calculated as 1 minus, the number of scorable free's conceded divided by the number of opposition attacks. The Division helps create the measure but subtracting this by one makes it easier to interpret on a positive scale. For example, if we concede 8 frees as a result of 25 opposition attacks. We subtract the .32 from 1 to identify our defensive composure as 68%. I hope these metrics are something you can bring to your analysis and provide new insights to your players and your coaches about defending when we get back to playing after this pandemic. If you have any topics or specific KPI's always feel free to reach out via Twitter, Facebook and here on our site.