The Great Ruck Debate.

[kruddler]

Again, the problem is visible here in the definition, because you can't determine what was deliberately knock on to advantage and a otherwise lucky fumble. A player might be credited with many knock ons to advantage, that result in no scores, but another player who picks up the foot cleanly and hits a target never gets credit for a knock on while creating many score assists.

It reminds be of the NRL knock on, possibly random due to the nature of an oval football or a clear assessment of clean ball handling? In isolation it means nothing.

Again, your problem is what you expect to get out of the stat, not the stat itself.

You want something as simple as - Win stat 'a' = win the game.
It doesn't work like that. It is not designed to work like that.
Nobody in their right mind should believe it would ever work like that.

You are looking at the HTA stat in isolation and saying its no good. The stat itself is good. You just want more information. Which you can get when you combine with other stats.
Hitouts as a stat gives you basically zero information because it gives you the same amount of information as if you were to throw the ball up in the air and let it land without a ruck touching it. It is ALL about what happens next and NOTHING to do with the hitout itself.
The hitout to advantage takes that into account (in part) and from there you can work out if it benefitted the side to the point of a score, or if it played into the oppositions hands who tackled you and won a free kick out of it (although technically, it wouldn't be a HTA if that happened as you need time to dispose of the ball).

Think about it this way.
A kick.

By itself, tells you very little.
Was it a small kick, a long kick, a kick out of bounds....on the full?
Did it find a teammate. Did it find the opposition. Was it a shot on goal? Did it score a goal?
Was it immediately smothered.
Was it towards your goal. Did you kick it the wrong direction by accident? Deliberately??
So using that 'kick' stat to see who won the game is never going to work. You need other stats.
However, the kick stat is correct as the ball had to hit your foot at least.

Do they keep 'kick' stats in soccer?
Backmen kick it back and forth to eachother 50 times a game, is that stat tracked? Is it important? Does it determine the game?
No. It tells us nothing. Its not tracked.

There are varying degrees of stats that tell us varying degrees of information.
The hitout stat tells us that our bloke got his hand on the ball before the other bloke. Thats it. Doesn't tell us where it went. Doesn't tell us if it helped us. Doesn't tell us if it helped them. Why do we keep that stat???