By John Harrington

When speaking at a live audience broadcast of the Irish Independent’s ‘The Throw-In GAA Podcast’ at the recent National Ploughing Championships, Pat Spillane offered a jaundiced take on the role of Performance Analysts in the GAA.

“Everything is driven by the statistician,” said Spillane. “The statistician tells the managers before the game, the statistician gives his stats at half-time, the statistician gives his stats at the end of the game.

“Yes, you can use some stats, but, I mean, think about this with statistics lads. Just think about this for a minute. According to a statistician, if you put your right foot into a bucket of boiling water, and you put your left foot into a bucket of freezing water, statistically you’re comfortable.”

Spillane got the laughs he was looking for, but it was a ludicrous statement even before he got as far as the freezing and boiling buckets of water.

The evolution of any sport is affected by a number of factors, including various branches of sports science, but the use of statistics is hardly the engine that drives tactical innovation.

Those who can take the bulk of the credit or blame for that depending on your perspective, are of course the coaches who are constantly devising new strategies that all have the same objective – to make winning easier.

Of course, many people aren’t happy that Gaelic games have become more possession-based sports in recent years, and in the same broadcast Spillane was happy to lay the blame for this shift at the feet of performance analysts.

“The two big things that statisticians want is possession and turnovers, and as long as you’re not turning over the ball, ‘oh, everyone is happy, we haven’t turned over the ball’, but ‘you’re losing by eight points’. ‘That’s not the point, we’ve only one turnover’.”

Another statement that doesn’t stand up to much examination, because as every performance analyst will tell you, the most important metric a team should chase is as many scoring opportunities created as possible.

It’s only common sense, but the more scoring opportunities you create in a match the better chance you have of winning it.

Teams are getting better too at both creating and executing them at the highest level in both Gaelic football and hurling, as an analysis of the 2022 Gaelic football and hurling championships highlighted.

The 36.9 scores per game in the football championship was the third highest on record, while the Tailteann Cup averaged 37.1 scores per game.

Goals per game increased during the 2022 football championship with 2.6 per game (the highest since 1989 when it was 2.7). There were also 2.6 goals per game scored during the Tailteann Cup.

In hurling, the 53.5 scores per game in the 2022 championship is the second highest ever seen in championship hurling. The last six years of Championship hurling have been the top six scoring seasons of all time, and the 66 scores we saw in the 2021 and 2022 All-Ireland Finals are the joint highest ever in Finals.

More scores don’t equate to a better spectacle in everyone’s eyes though, and performance analysts are an easy target for those who don’t like the direction the games have gone in recent years.

That’s arguably because not many people have a great understanding of the role of performance analysts in Gaelic games, and, as if often the case, ignorance can lead to distrust.

The authors of the Gaelic Games Performance Analysis guide for Good Practice which was launched last Friday in Croke Park hope their publication will go some way to tackling any misconceptions that are out there.

Produced by the Performance Analysis sub-group of the Gaelic Games Sports Science Working Group, it’s an incredibly detailed publication that should be a tremendous resource not just for performance analysts themselves, but also coaches, players, club and county officials, and even parents.

It highlights the six areas in which performance analysis can support coaches and players, shines a light on exactly what performance analysts do, details how individuals and teams can best work effectively with a performance analyst, and how to find a quality assured Gaelic games performance analyst.

If you read the document, and you can do so at the bottom of this article, the impression you’re left with is that performance analysts are facilitators above all else.

They’re not the ones driving tactical change in Gaelic games, they’re simply helping both coaches and players to maximise their potential.

“A lot of the job of the stats person is to give the coach a more complete picture of what's happening,” says Dr. Denise Martin, a leading member of the Gaelic Games Sports Science Performance Analysis sub-group.

“It's very rare I'm telling a coach something they didn't already know, but what I am giving is a bit more detail on what they think was happening.

“You might be concerned about how you're moving the ball out of defence, but what you want me to do is go and put some structure on that for me. When we move the ball who is the link person, or where is that breaking down?

“If the defence can sit down together and watch a video and say, oh, 'this is when we're not wide enough' or 'this is when we're not moving the ball fast enough', that's very empowering for a group of players to identify. There's no point just telling a group of players you're not moving the ball fast enough.

“There's a really lovely phrase that I've stolen unashamedly from Colm Clear, which is ‘the lightbulb moment’.

“The point of the video is to create the lightbulb moment for players and coaches. To say, wow, right, that's really valuable. I didn't realise that was happening and now I've seen it I can't unsee it and I'll do something about it.

“That's the whole concept. Trying to create more reflective players and more reflective coaches. As a coach, and this is something Brian Cody has said, you don't see it all in a match. You couldn't see everything that happens.”

Martin is a lecturer in Sports Performance Analysis in TU Dublin and has been a performance analyst for a wide variety of inter-county teams, starting in 2002 with the Derry footballers who were then managed by Eamonn Coleman.

In the intervening 20 years performance analysis has come a long way in terms of the technology used by its practitioners, but many of the fundamentals remain the same.

“It's incredible, it's amazing to see the growth,” says Martin. “But fundamentally, the technology just makes is easier to give feedback.

“It still all comes down to just doing simple things very well. You just hold up the mirror at the right time with the right feedback to create that lightbulb moment.

“That's what it's all about. Can you show you someone, be it a kid or an adult, something where they go, 'ah!' It's about those lightbulb moments.

“Yes, we now have lovely video technology and we can do so much more in terms of that, but just because you can do it doesn't necessarily meant that you should. That's one thing you have to come back to, is it adding value?

“Is it just making players feel better about themselves and play better? And is it helping coaches do a better job? Because if it's not, then it's just noise.

“Just because you can measure something, doesn't mean you should. It has to come back to ‘why?’ Why are we doing this?

“I know some of the best analysts in the country working with clubs doing a club analysis and they're doing hand notation during a match. You don't need the super high-tech stuff all the time.

“Yes, technology has been amazing, but it still all boils down to whether you can create that lightbulb moment. If you can't deliver it, then forget about it, there's no point.”

Some people might view performance analysis as being the preserve of inter-county football and hurling, but the truth is that it can be used effectively at all levels of the game.

The goal of every coach should be to enable their players to become better and so enjoy playing their sport all the more, and performance analysis, used in the right way, can help them do that at underage level as much as in the senior game.

“What every coach wants to do is get as complete a picture of performance as possible,” says Martin.

“That's just as true if you’re working with U-14s when the analyst is just somebody taking the scores or tracking who scored or who is shooting.

“What you'll find particularly at underage level is that some kids aren't shooting. You don't give that information back to players, but you can then condition things in training where once the superstar player gets to three points, they start passing now. Three points is your quota for today.

“That helps to create those conditions and it gives the other players the right to shoot then instead of feeling I have to defer to the superstar and pass to him or her all the time.

“It's all about being positive. If you're not creating a positive learning environment you shouldn't be doing this.

“We have to keep as many possible playing for as long as possible, and something that works really well with kids is to show them video footage of their heroes playing.

“So, if I'm in Donegal, Michael Murphy is their hero. Can you show them Michael Murphy being on the edge of the square because a lot of young players don't get the whole edge of the square thing and making a run from the square as opposed to making a run from midfield in a game.

“Can we show him doing that skill well, or another player doing another skill well? The power of a photograph and the power of video is really important and that's something we'd love to get to as well where we would have video libraries.

“In your club, if you can create what your brand is in terms of how you play, that can be really powerful.

“How do we like to play? If you can get the senior team to show younger teams how they move the ball out of defence, that would help you replicate it with the U-14s.

“That's the kind of thing you can go after, but you're not doing analysis on U-14s.

“One of the things is this idea of model performance or this idea of what good looks like. Kids are learning the game, they're learning what we mean by 'playing wide' or 'playing deep'. They have to learn that somewhere.

“That's when we can show them and that's where the video or when we're doing a walk-through or something like that on the pitch that can do so much to help them understand performance better.

“The other idea is that what's measured is managed. When I started with the Dublin hurlers I was at training with my pen and my clipboard and hardly a ball dropped at training. I was just writing down the colour of the helmets so I would get to know who was who!

“But it's amazing that when you start measuring drills in training or counting wides in training, they soon start going over the bar. It's about just concentrating the mind and getting players to pay full attention. Analysis can help that.

“And it can be used at training like that. Even just simple numbers at training like, ok, we're playing a training match and our target is getting ten blocks in, or whatever metric you choose, and that's as much analysis as you're doing with kids.”

In 2016, the GAA started an accreditation process for performance analysts, and now there are around 250 people accredited.

It’s a strong community where ideas and resources are shared freely. A good example of this is the fact that all senior inter-county football teams share their Allianz League video footage that’s captured by the team’s performance analysts.

That resource was a spin-off from the annual community of practice day where accredited performance analysts and anyone with an interest in the sport science come together in IT Carlow to share their ideas.

This sort of cross-pollination of ideas has only accelerated since the Gaelic Games Sports Science Working Group was established in 2020.

Chaired by Dr Aoife Lane, Head of the Department of Sport and Health Sciences in TUS Midlands Midwest, the Working Group is a who’s who of leaders in various fields of Sports Science like Athletic Development, Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation, Nutrition, Performance Analysis, Psychology and Wellbeing, and Skill Acquisition and Biomechanics.

The Gaelic Games Performance Analysis Guide for Good Practice is the first major publication to come from the wider Sports Science Working Group, but we can expect many more in the coming years.

Their remit is to generate a framework for the delivery of sports science in Gaelic Games, for men and women, across all stages of the player pathway, and the sharing of ideas across the sports science disciplines is already producing exciting results.

“It's been fantastic,” says Martin. “I have to say, it's huge kudos to Aoife Lane and how she's empowered each group but also facilitated that communication between groups.

“For example, our Guide for Practice went out to all the other disciplines and they were able to come back with really helpful feedback.

“Being part of that group and the structure that Aoife Lane has done, I could not say enough about her leadership, she's just brilliant. That has been really, really important and people have been wonderful.”

All sports evolve and Gaelic games is no different. The people behind such evolution in sport are always the most innovative coaches.

In their hands, performance analysis, like every other discipline of sports science, can be a powerful tool.

But if you don’t like how Gaelic games have evolved in recent years, don’t blamed the performance analysts.

They’re just facilitating the brightest coaches and most enthusiastic players to be the best they can be.

The eight members of the Performance Analysis Working Group are as follows: Denise Martin, Colm Clear, Johnny Bradley, Niall Collins, Brian McDonnell, Louise Byrne, Emma Byrne, Alan Swanton, and Kevin McGuigan.

The Gaelic Games Performance Analysis Guide for Good Practice can be viewed and downloaded below.