The thing I find is that when you need stats to defend a player it's usually an indication that the player was poor. Stats can confirm a good performance and they can confirm a bad performance. What stats can't do is cover up a poor performance.3rd generation saint wrote:One stat that does defend Raph is the 82% efficiency, that means of his 22 possessions, 18 went to a St.Kilda player and too our advantage.
If all our players were getting 82% efficiency, they might as well hand us the cup now.
If Raph plays a bad game, then I will criticise him, but he has been good the last two weeks and has done his job.
Yes players kicked goals on him because the team was caught out, not just Raph, he also stopped attacks, got some hard balls and hit targets 82% of the time.
Not bad for a hack player.
Most of us use our eyes to determine how good a player was.
Raph had 8 kicks and 14 handballs. Efficiency counts handballs too. A player can have 14 handballs for a game and hit the target on all of them and his efficiency will be at 100%. Does that necessarily mean he's had a good game? No.
Lets say all of Raph's handballs hit the target today and four of his kicks missed the target. That's about 82% efficiency right there although his kicking efficiency would've been 50%.
And to the poster above who claims expectations are higher for Raph than for any other player. Are you kidding me?
Raph can have a below average game (certainly an extremely poor first half), as he did today IMO, and most of the sycophants on here will still claim he was good and deserves to keep his spot. Why? Sympathy for what he's endured in the past or because of some of the comments directed at him from the outer.
What stats don't show is that when the heat was on in the first half, he was nowhere near the pace.
Gerard Healy saw it. I saw it. Most of us who aren't blinded by sympathy for the bloke saw it. He was poor.