Laptops level playing field
When we say shadowy, there is nothing sinister about this breed. It’s just we don’t know much about them. In the backroom team acknowledgements, they are listed somewhere between the liaison officer and nowhere at all.
Yet they are intrinsic to the modern day inter-county operation. Every team has a team of them. Ray Boyne was a key component of the Dublin footballers’ 2011 All-Ireland success as were John Murphy and Eoin O’Neill with Cork the year before.
Their apparatus costs a bit too. Nationally, the amount spent each year on providing the technology goes into six figures.
Abbeyside/Ballinacourty man Tomás Ó Cadhla, the Waterford County Board’s cultural officer, has worked with both his own county’s senior and U21 hurlers as well as Wexford’s senior footballers under Jason Ryan.
Having operated both Sportscode and Dartfish systems, he continues to assist Waterford’s seniors having come on board with Davy Fitzgerald.
“The label that they’ve put on us is performance analysts. But anybody who pays into a match or has an interest in any specific game that they go is an analyst themselves.
“They’re trying to deduce why their team or one team is six points down and the other is six points up.
“Those involved with teams at inter-county level are bringing on that concept.
“It’s vital now. If you look at hurling, barring Kilkenny, there’s not much of a difference between teams. What you’re trying to do then is gain every half per cent you can to win the game.
“That now involves sitting down pre-match, looking at opposition and perhaps something like puck-outs. There are goalkeeper who have specific puck-out routines, whether it’s that they stand on the left side of the square and puck to the right or pull their left sleeve when they’re pucking to the left.
“Last year, John O’Brien for Tipperary was at full-forward and one of the wing forwards would drift out of position in order to create space for him to win the puck-out.
“They did it the two previous games before the Munster final and we were very aware of that going into the Munster final. We tried to counteract that, we lost concentration for one particular ball in the first half and conceded a goal because of it.
“When you know the other team well and tell the players about them they gain confidence.”
At this time of the year when pre-season and league teams are more liable to change than Championship sides, more emphasis is placed on one’s own charges.
Indeed, knowledge of what’s closer to home remains the most important empirical area and the cutting edge now is real time data being fed from the statisticians to the sideline.
Up until now, the majority of inter-county set-ups have delivered their first half data in the dressing room at half-time. That’s changing.
“Real time analysis is the goal,” says Ó Cadhla. “We’re looking at doing a bit more of it this year than previous years.
“We feel if something is going wrong 10 minutes into the game then 10 minutes into the game is the time to deal with it.
“We’ve been using Ipads down on the line at the minute to relay particular information straight away.”
Counties’ performance analysis teams depend a lot on the goodwill of the likes of RTE, TV3 and Nemeton to provide them with footage both during games and previous matches.
Many a post-match interview with Jack O’Connor was briefly interrupted by a TV official handing the former Kerry manager a DVD of the game just played.
Starting up a statistics programme can cost up to €20,000 with an annual support fee of approximately €2,000. And yet Croke Park is the only GAA stadium with facilities specifically available for video analysis, which could have something to do with international rugby games being staged there during the Noughties.
Ó Cadhla believes GAA authorities have yet to accept that such practice is here to stay.
“How you get on largely depends on the steward you’re going to meet on any given day,” he sighs. “The one group of people who have yet to fall into what we’re doing are the likes of the provincial councils.
“To do what we do, we need an area in the ground where we can get a live TV feed and electricity to run the machinery we need.
“At the moment, they don’t play ball on it. They don’t see the function of the video analyst.
“The one thing you’re reliant on when doing video analysis is a good quality video. You need a feed to correlate with the statistics that you’re taking at a particular time.
“You can bring a cameraman, which you have to do for games which aren’t covered by TV. There’s a bit of work in that to get someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s not the job for a fella who videotapes weddings at weekends — it needs to be very specific to what we need such as angles of the action.
“But you need a good working relationship with the TV staff who are there in the ground.
“If you’re looking at providing live stats to management and players backed up with video evidence that could perhaps lead to a change in the course of the game you need to make sure everything is up to scratch.”
The shadowy figures with the thankless jobs aren’t going away any time soon.
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