Goals in Hurling: Effort and Expected

By John Considine

Like many field sports, hurling is a game with multiple types of scoring.  Depending on the height that the ball crosses between two vertical posts, a team is awarded one or three points.  The three points score is called a goal.  A goal is equivalent to 3 points.  But how hard is it for a team to get a goal compared to a point?  That question is not easy to answer.  However, we can look at how many goals and points are scored in games.  This will give us an indication of the way teams see the effort and reward.  Below is a picture of the ratio of points to goals in a sample of top level hurling games in the 21st century.

There is only a handful of games used for each year.  The All-Ireland final, semi-finals, and two provincial finals.  The 2020 season is an outlier.  This pandemic season was different.  Games were played in the winter and without spectators.  The second highest ratio occurred in 2017 when Galway seemed to decide that points, rather than goals, was the way to the ultimate goal.

Conventional wisdom suggests that teams are opting to seek out more long range scores in the form of points.  A good example of this conventional wisdom is articulated by Christy O'Connor (e.g. here).  O'Connor has a range of experience that is hard to match.  As a player, he has collected honours at the highest level for county and club.  He has coached to the highest level.  He has documented the game via his journalism for all of the period in the picture above.  The word "wisdom" is appropriate.

In May 2008, O'Connor wrote an article in the Sunday Times about the location from where goals were scored.  The piece was accompanied by an info-graphic with the data from four different seasons.  The seasons were five years apart.  The seasons were 1992, 1997, 2002, and 2007.  I scanned the piece at the time and the latter two seasons, from that scanned picture, are reproduced here.

In the past, I have used the data to explain to players how and why they should defend the "D" zone around the goal.  Most coaches do something similar.  Older ones call it "minding the house".  Such coaching is probably a contributing factor to attacking players deciding that it is easier to take a point from a less congested zone further out the field.

Not much has changed, if one is to judge from the 2018 season.  Below is a plot of the goals from play in 2018.  It excludes scores from placed balls.  Six of those excluded scores were from the 20m line.  It also excludes Patrick Horgan's long range free in the All-Ireland semi-final and the ball that Austin Gleeson was judged to have "dropped/carried" over his own line in the Gaelic Grounds.

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The solid red circles are goals where the attacker threw up the ball from his hand before striking it with two hands on the hurley.  The two white circles with the red rims are scores where the player threw the ball over his head and smashed it tennis-style.  The solid blue circles are ground strokes where the ball is struck while it is on the ground or bouncing.  Limerick's Graeme Mulachy accounts for pushing/striking a few of the ones closest to the goal.  (I'll leave the yellows, whites with blue rims, and black to be guessed.)

One final thought.  Imagine the difficulty in computing an Expected Goals measure in hurling.  Identifying the exact location of the above scores was not easy and one could easily quibble with one or two.  With less than 100 goals, it is not exactly big data.  Then consider the range of methods of shooting listed above.  Like playing for goals, it might not be worth the effort.