Buckley charged with keeping special focus on Ireland

There is nowhere to hide for professional rugby players these days. Every move is covered, every strength and weakness highlighted — all by a video analyst lurking in the background.

Helping plot the downfall of Emerging Ireland’s opponents in the current IRB Nations Cup in Bucharest is 25-year-old John Buckley, who has just finished his first full year as video analyst with RaboDirect champions Leinster.

The former Castleknock schoolboy who played as an out-half has two different degrees, one in Economics and Geography from NUI Maynooth and in Sports Management from UCD, but then chose a different career path.

“I went to a variety of courses and then approached Mervyn Murphy (Ireland analyst) and told him I would like to get involved, and I gained experience at an Irish training camp at Carton House before the 2011 World Cup.

“In college I had to do 10 weeks’ work placement the following summer and I was put in touch with Emmett Farrell in Leinster. I stayed involved for my final year in college, just doing different bits and pieces. Then I did a bit of work with the Leinster U20s and when a full-time position came up, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

The life of a video analyst requires a lot of cooperation with the coaching staff, recognising what footage is required by them and that all angles of team performance are covered. Buckley starts after an early breakfast, running the video to provide a team review before going on to run another video at training in the afternoon, coming back and cutting the footage into various sections, highlighting areas of interest.

“You work with them (coaches) on the basis that you should know what they want, and basically you provide that to them. After training, you know exactly what they want; after a match it’s different when you code the game live during it and then give them a rough copy during the match, come back afterwards, code it up and put on different camera angles.”

His role between Bucharest and Dublin is also a little different. “Yeah, with three games here (and the quick turnaround), there’s much more self-analysis required. After the games, you go through individual analysis, the attack and defence, things like carrying, passing, tackling, things happening at the breakdown, that’s for each player and you need to have that ready for coaches by the next day. In Leinster during the week, you do a lot of opposition analysis in the week leading up to the game, looking at their lineouts, scrums, restarts where opportunities or threats are.”