Ireland's World Cup campaign provides challenges to those working behind the scenes

Meet the team working behind the team at Ireland's first ever major tournament.

VERA's ARMY: Republic of Ireland manager Vera Pauw with her coaching staff. Photo credit: Brian Lawless/PA Wire.

News last summer that Finland were parting ways with head coach Anna Signeul sounded like good news for an Irish team due to meet the Scandinavians in a crucial World Cup qualifier at the start of September. Andy Holt wouldn’t have disagreed per se, but he was entitled to greet the development with mixed feelings.

Holt is the performance analyst for Vera Pauw’s squad so a fair chunk of his working life is spent poring over footage of upcoming opponents alongside assistant coach Tom Elmes. Anything up to ten of a team’s previous games will come under their microscopes long before the first player checks into camp so, while football is a game that habitually thrills and surprises, it’s their job not to be taken aback by anything new.

Finland last autumn wasn’t a shock, but it did represent a challenge.

Signeul was relieved of her duties at the end of July after a European Championship experience that subjected her side to three defeats with eight goals conceded. The game against Ireland in Tallaght, just five weeks later, would be their first under new man Marko Saloranta so Holt and Elmes had to look for breadcrumbs elsewhere.

“They had literally just gotten rid of their manager so we were a little bit apprehensive on what way they'd set up, but their interim manager was the women's U17s head coach,” says Holt.

“So we had a look at how they set up for their women's 17s formation-wise. Sometimes you can be a little bit shocked, but yeah...” It ended well.

Lilly Agg’s 54th-minute strike claimed a 1-0 win for Ireland and secured the playoff place that ultimately catapulted the team to the upcoming World Cup. The side’s first ever appearance at a major tournament, it will throw up some contrasting challenges to the two men charged with compiling such detailed dossiers.

The task when it comes to Australia and Canada will be to wade through the mass of information available and boil it down to the bones. The key, in all cases, is to distil it into its four key functions: attacking, defending, transition to attack and transition to defence. Look at enough video and trends soon begin to reveal themselves.

Nigeria? Not so simple.

FIFA hosts a platform where teams upload their own tactical footage within 24 hours of a game but the Nigerians seem to have been lax in this regard so Ireland have instead utilised a few degrees of separation by scrapping together clips uploaded by the USA and New Zealand after recent friendlies with the African side.

“We've been able to do our due diligence there,” says Holt.

We live in the Digital Age but raw data is one thing, making it work for you can be another. Ger Dunne, performance analyst with Stephen Kenny’s side, will be assisting Holt and Elmes during the tournament and key to it all is the ability to compress and present the right information to the right people at the right time.

The squad’s masseuse, Hannah Tobin Jones, operates the camera for games, so Holt divides his attention between the pitch in front of him and a MacBook. Hotkeys are his best friends as he snips and shapes footage in real time but only a handful of clips will survive the cutting room floor and make it as far as a coach or a player.

“We would then have three or four clips - what we're doing well, how we can improve or what we can improve on - and then we'd show them at half-time. It's a big part of the game, especially if the players can see exactly what they can [do], or areas that we could exploit the opposition. It's really helpful, we've found, and the players are giving good feedback on it as well.”

He isn’t the only one crunching numbers and monitoring trends. Niamh McDaid is the squad’s sports scientist. It’s her job to keep tabs on every player’s GPS stats during training and games using her StatSports iPad and an app called Polar that provides instant information on heart rates. All told, she tracks 250 metrics as they happen.

Like Holt, her job extends long after the final whistle as they crunch numbers like cars in a scrapyard, the end products emerging as easily-digestible and usable nuggets that may add that extra 1%, or even 0.1%, to the next performance.

All this is an inter-departmental effort. Holt, Elmes, Pauw and goalkeeping coach Jan Willem van Ende will dissect the footage of the opposition and tailor it for their tactical purposes. McDaid liaises closely with Dr Siobhan Forman and the squad’s physiotherapists, their efforts reflected in an injury-profile that has been strikingly low.

“Coaches are seeing the benefit of it,” McDaid explains. “The numbers don’t lie, I always say. It’s a fantastic tool to have to make informed decisions. Of course, the tactical side of it is important but if you can back it up with the sports science side of things as well it’s a great tool to have.”

If VAR is the most visible, and controversial, example as to how technology has elbowed its way into modern football then there has always been a cadre of people in the game who view anything with a computer chip with a deep suspicion.

Its seven years since Ian Cathro’s appointment as Hearts manager prompted a disdainful column in the Scottish Sun from Kris Boyd who described him as “one of the up-and-coming modern-era coaches who can organise a session just by flicking open his laptop”.

Boyd questioned whether Cathro, who has since held assistant roles at Wolves and Spurs, had the man management skills to go with it and Holt acknowledges that his is just one arm and that the use of data will depend more than anything on the head of operations.

“My first camp was under Tom O'Connor in the USA (with the U16s in) 2019. What he looks for compared to what Vera would look for… Some things are obviously the same but some things are completely different.

“You have to get the understanding of what your head coach wants, and then work from there. It takes a bit of time to build that relationship, but obviously working under Vera for four years now, we've got a great understanding with each other.”