JIM GAVIN’S SHORT-LIVED stand-off with RTÉ last month highlighted the importance inter-county teams place on video analysis.
The Dublin manager refused to do post-match interviews with the national broadcaster for two consecutive weeks in February after a request for footage of Tyrone’s league game against Galway was turned down.
During the championship, the Sunday Game production team upload every match they cover to a Google Drive which is made available to all inter-county teams. However, the same service is not provided during the league, which can make it difficult for some backroom teams to study their upcoming opponents.
During an interview last weekend, Turlough O’Brien revealed his novel approach to inform his weekly scouting reports. The Carlow manager makes regular trips to Paddy’s News Express in Portlaoise, where he gets his hands on copies of local newspapers which extensively cover most of his side’s Division 4 opponents.
“You can track teams, track players, get a feel for how things are really going within a county,” O’Brien told the Irish Examiner.
O’Brien and Carlow also rely on match footage to inform game-plans, as all inter-county set-ups do.
The worrying thing about the Gavin-RTÉ dispute was the question: If the All-Ireland champions are struggling to get footage of their opponents, what chance have the rest of the country?
However, since Dublin’s issue with RTÉ went public, inter-county teams around the country have taken steps to make more footage available to all. Of the 34 teams involved in the All-Ireland senior football championship, performance analysts with 22 counties are involved in a Whatsapp group where full match footage of league games are freely shared among the teams.
Footage of your own games must be uploaded in order to remain in the group and access the database.
“There is a serious amount of work being done,” London GAA performance analyst Shane Mangan tells The42.
“We set the group up about 18 months ago. In the last three rounds of the league we’ve set-up a video sharing service, so that’s been a big help.
“We have about 22 counties out of the 34 teams that compete, so they’re contributing videos each week. It makes our job easier and it’s a testament to the work being done now in terms of video analysis.
“If you’ve signed up for it you have to upload your video after each match and if the team that hasn’t signed up for it is at home, the away team will upload the video.
“It’s very useful especially for the league because it can be very hard to get videos of opposing teams during the league. Hopefully, we can build on that now and keep it going during the championship.”
In the last decade, performance analysts have become a key part of most inter-county set-ups, and squads are spending more time than every analysing video footage.
It hasn’t all been plain sailing. In January, Clare hurler Brendan Bugler bemoaned the “mental torture” of all the video analysis that had to be done in a group setting at training.
“Men playing senior hurling at the top level are mature enough to take personal responsibility for their own game,” he wrote in column for AIB.
“I would much have preferred to analyse my own game and the team’s game in the luxury of my sitting room rather than in a cold, damp room either before or after training. I simply hated these meetings.”
But many county teams trust their players to do the video work in their own time. Kevin McStay described recently on SportsJOE’s The GAA Hour how Roscommon uploaded their match analysis to a private YouTube account which all players have access to.
The Roscommon management can even track who logs in and watches the footage so players can be held to account if they don’t do the homework.
Ciaran Deely’s London take a similar approach. The Sunday night of a league or championship game, Mangan will go through the match footage and break it down using Sportscode software.
“You’ll probably have 20 lads who played the game, so a video for each player with very involvement they have with the ball,” explains Mangan.
“Say if it’s Liam Gavaghan, I’ll watch all his clips from the game and tag it. So he’ll have a successful handpass, a shot from play, turnover loss, contact tackle, those sorts of things. That part gives us the stats for each individual player but most importantly each player will get their own individual video the day after the game.
“They’ll log into Youtube and they’re able to watch their clips of themselves and then we also do team videos. So we’ll have a video of all our kick-outs in a game and one of all our shots, that sort of thing. It’s just a matter of trying to reduce the amount of time the players have watching the video.
“They can watch the full match if they want, but we want to make it so that they can watch what’s specific to them. They can watch their own clips and the specific team clips so it just cuts down on the time involved.
“The players like it. When I started with London I would have done the two championship games they played in last year against Leitrim and Carlow. In January I was chatting to the players and they said they really liked the individual clips so we kept it up for the league and we’ll continue it on for the rest of the year as well.”
London may be a Division 4 team, but their preparation is up there with any county. That shouldn’t be a surprise given they’re led by the forward-thinking Deely, whose day job sees him work with QPR as a sports scientist.
Mangan is their head performance analyst while he’s helped two interns who are on placement from WIT. Also part of the backroom team is Chris Traynor, who acts as an Irish-based scout for London.
“I’ll do the opposition analysis for every game we’re playing,” says Mangan.
“I’ll do the opposition analysis report, Chris will do a scouting report and we’ll discuss that with the management. We’ll send on the clips of the other teams and just discuss how we can set-up and prevent them from playing their game and exploit their weaknesses.”
Mangan is unusual for a performance analyst in that he’s based in Dublin, and would rarely visit the London training base. He was headhunted by Deely after the London manager read some of Mangan’s research work at IT Tallaght.
“I would have been putting my research up on Twitter and things I was working on with teams here in Ireland, and ideas. Ciaran Deely contacted me through Twitter. He just sent me a private message asking if I wanted to get involved and that they were looking to push on their performance analysis side of things.”
As part of his day job Mangan is a lecturer in IT Tallaght, while he’s also involved in the cutting edge Gaelic Sport Research Centre, which is a breeding ground for the next generation of performance analysts in the GAA.
“We’re unique in the sense we’ve about five post-grads working in Gaelic Sport. It was started by Kieran Collins who’s from Cork and he would have been involved with Cork for the last few years in the background.
“We have links to a lot of teams at the minute. Two lads that are working here are working with Longford, we’ve a fella that’s with Offaly and then we’ve other links to the Cork camogie team, the Meath camogie team, in the past we worked with Mayo, Dublin hurlers.
“Say you want to run a specific project, you go to a team looking to run that project. At the minute myself and another postgrad Shane Malone are involved with Ballyboden St Enda’s. I’m doing my PhD data collection with Ballyboden so I’d be at the matches and training collecting data.
“At the same time you’re working with the team so you’re feeding back data and interacting with the players. So it’s a win-win really. We’re getting our data but we’re also doing a job for the team and helping them improve.
“We’re unique in the country in that there might be one or two people working in Gaelic research but it’s not a collective. There are people in UCD who wouldn’t have people to bounce ideas off, where we’re quite lucky that we can.
“The GAA themselves are trying hard to improve the quality of work that’s being done. Denise Martin has set-up an accreditation system for performance analysts now where you have to go to a training course and meet the required standards to be working with a county team.
“That’s quite positive. The level of quality with lads I work with would be up there with any professional soccer teams without a doubt. It’s just a matter of resources. Most county teams now have GPS, some of them might have heart-rates, they’re all monitoring wellness and that’s essentially all you do if you are a sports scientist with a professional club. So it’s down to the quality of the individual that’s working in that role.”
While video analysis is now widespread among club teams, Mangan believes the use GPS technology is the next frontier in the inter-county game.
He is involved with one elite inter-county hurling side that use GPS data for an overhead map the position of players on the field and it tells the speed they are moving at any stage during a game.
This time-motion analysis is used in the AFL and Premier League, but it’s groundbreaking in the GAA. Mangan believes his team are the only sports side in Ireland using the technology at present.
“There’s only really one county team that’s using it, that’s an inter-county hurling team I’m working with at the minute. They’re using it to see how players react, so if we win a turnover which players are making the burst forward?
“As well we use it for puck-outs to see the position of players. It’s in the early stages. It’s useful for coaches and video analysts at the minute. In the future, what you can get from it – and it’s a bit over my head at the minute – but you can get objective data from it. So say if our corner-backs deviate too much from the full-back line, are the opposition more likely to score?
“From a tactical analysis side of things, it’s quite useful for that. This is the only team I know that’s doing it and it’s probably the only team I know that’s doing it at the moment.
“It’s a trial and error really for us but it depends on the GPS system, there are three or four manufacturers of GPS that are currently involved with inter-county teams but not all of them you can get that data to make those sort of maps.”
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