WHEN BRIAN FITZPATRICK arrived in Agen last year, the French Pro D2 club’s losing streak was already at 27 games.
So any challenges that the Irish analyst was facing with the language barrier and impressing new coaches and players were all the trickier when he was hired in July 2021.
As it turned out, Agen’s run of misery extended to 34 consecutive defeats. It finally ended with a 25-21 win over Aurillac, a full 608 days since their last victory.
“It was very bad at times,” says Fitzpatrick, who is now back in Ireland running his own company, BF Sports Analysis.
“There was just this mental hang-up. They were so used to losing and then there were about 20 new signings that summer, so you had this cohesion problem.”
Making the move to France hadn’t been a difficult decision for Fitzpatrick in the first place. Former Bandon RFC and Bandon Grammar School coach Régis Sonnes was the boss, with Agen aiming to bounce straight back up into the Top 14 after relegation.
Bernard Jackman and Dewald Senekal, who is now with Connacht, had provided testimonials for Fitzpatrick and the south of France appealed.
“It was an easy sell to my now-wife,” says Fitzpatrick with a smile. “There was a bit of itchy feet after Covid too. I went in and was the only non-French person on the staff. It was 10 years since doing French at school but I put loads of effort in – private lessons, lessons in the club. Living in France was unreal, the house we had, the life we had.”
The rugby side of things was trickier, even if results improved. Sonnes was suspended by the club in October and Agen finally broke their losing streak a week later.
“It was such a massive relief,” recalls Fitzpatrick, who is also currently coaching the Belvedere College junior cup team. “Agen represents the whole town. It’s not like if Leinster lose and people just get on with things. There’s so much more pain in it.”
Two of Sonnes’ assistants had taken over on an interim basis that lasted a couple of months before former Perpignan back row Bernard Goutta was hired as the new head coach in January of this year.
All of the chopping and changing was far from ideal for Fitzpatrick as he looked to settle in and make an impact with his analysis.
He did his best to add value in areas of the game he has deeply researched. For example, he pushed Agen to go for tries more often rather than kicking three points off the tee with their penalties. His study of the data suggests there was more pay-off to be had from the ambitious approach. Not being fluent in French didn’t help him convince the coaches.
“Tu es pas un entraîneur,” came the reprimand when he called for penalties to be kicked to touch. You’re not a coach.
Agen managed to finish the season with 10 wins, keeping them safely in the Pro D2 but Fitzpatrick left the club in June having learned more from the struggles than good things.
“I would definitely go again but I’d probably be pickier with the club and my role,” he says. “I have worked in England, France, and Ireland now and I’ve seen the strengths and weaknesses of all three. It’s cool to have that perspective.”
A native of Dublin, Fitzpatrick has lived and breathed rugby for as long as he can remember. Super Rugby at 6.30am on Saturday mornings, playing with Suttonians and Belvedere College, starting his coaching badges at the age of 17. A rugby obsessive from day one.
He says he wasn’t the best player as a teenager but he loved planning backs moves for his teams, as well as taking rigorous notes about his own place-kicking and training.
“I knew I was a nerd but I didn’t know I was an analyst,” he says with a laugh.
He studied Sports Science at Wrexham University, Wales, which led to doing a dissertation with the Welsh Rugby Union looking at the physiologically demands on rugby players. Back home in Ireland, he worked with Dublin GAA alongside Emmett Farrell, Leinster’s analyst.
In 2015, Fitzpatrick secured a job as London Irish’s academy analyst, meaning he worked with the highly-rated Nick Kennedy, who is now Saracens’ director of recruitment. Back then, the Exiles had talents like Joe Cokanasiga, Ollie Hassell-Collins, and Ben Loader breaking through.
Fitzpatrick was part of the set-up that won the U18 Academy Premiership and his role developed to include coaching and some administration too in his second year. The experience was valuable.
“I learned about using analysis for the development of the player rather than for just analysing a player,” he explains.
“With those U18 players, you’re trying to create content they enjoy. As opposed to just putting up a tactical clip or slide, can you make that more engaging with music, movements, colour, whatever?
“Then you’re trying to develop a relationship with them and get them to enjoy what you’re doing, not just seeing it as a measure of them. If you’re looking at ruck entry, it’s a chance to improve, not just ‘this ruck was shit.’”
Alongside his role with London Irish, Fitzpatrick worked as the performance analyst for the IRFU Exiles, meaning trips around the UK to help young Irish-qualified players.
In what was a busy period of his life, he also launched BF Sports Analysis, who now work with several All-Ireland League clubs, as well as having clients in the UK, US, and Australia.
Fitzpatrick signed up with the Poland national team in those early days of the company, flying in and out for their training camps and games.
That stint brought back childhood memories, with his father’s work having meant the Fitzpatricks lived in Poland for three years until Brian was six. Back in Poland, he ended up as defence coach on top of his analysis work, but it was a short-lived thing.
“It was mental,” says Fitzpatrick. “I loved it. The players wanted to run through brick walls for their country. It ended because I was still paying for my own flights.”
BF Sports Analysis has slowly grown in recent years despite the pandemic. Fitzpatrick did his best to ride that period out by running several in-depth webinars, including a very well-received deep dive on the lineout with Senekal.
Fitzpatrick has brought in two employees – Conor Malone and former Finland international Anthony Martinez – and is now doing fascinating work with data in rugby.
His research on teams’ decision-making with penalties – whether to kick the points or chase a try – is intriguing. In short, the numbers suggest Ireland definitely should have gone into the corner in Paris in the Six Nations this year.
This all stems from the xP [expected points] model that BF Sports have built over the past four years using data from thousands of games across all levels of the sport from top Tests down to the amateur game.
The xP data is similar to xG [expected goals] in soccer, xP in basketball, or ‘strokes gained’ in golf.
Essentially, the xP model that Fitzpatrick has created for rugby tells you how many points you should expect to score from a given possession in a specific area of the pitch.
For example, how many points your team should expect, on average, to score from a lineout 10 metres out on the right-hand side. The data set contains thousands and thousands of real-life lineouts in that exact position.
The xP model covers 30 zones of the pitch and includes information on how many penalties teams win from those positions on average, how often the opposition are yellow-carded when a team attacks from there, and more. Fitzpatrick aims to distill the reams of information into very digestible numbers for his clients.
He will soon submit a paper to be published and believes the xP model can be hugely impactful for more teams in rugby.
“For me, xP solves three problems,” says Fitzpatrick. “First, you’ve got tactical decisions and improvements. The second bit is for measurement and assessment, where the team is versus average and how do we solve it?
“The third part is recruitment. Say, how do we increase our xP at lineout? So if our team is poor at lineout, go and look at teams who have good xP from lineouts and pick the player who causes that. Rather than your first question being ‘what position does he play?’ the question is ‘what problem does he solve?’ and then look for the player.
“We’ll get the paper published and then people who are way smarter than me are going to tell me what’s shit about it, then we can improve it through that. But we’ve been doing this for four years, so it’s done well and it’s thorough.”
BF Sports’ current clients have access to the xP model, while they aim to help teams in other ways by providing video analysis and concise data on their games.
Fitzpatrick gives an example of one club who were winning lots of lineout turnovers. He asked them if they had any plans for how they used possession from lineout turnovers. The club then developed plays in those scenarios and started scoring or making big gains off those turnovers.
“For me, you try to relate everything back to the scoreboard,” he says. “I know you can’t put an exact measure on what impact we have, but I know all the teams we worked with got better in the second half of last season, whether it was Agen, Terenure, or Wanderers.
“We know it makes an impact when we can measure, ask the right questions, and get them to innovate in the right areas.”
