Video analysis in sport: Benefits and insights from GB and England Hockey

Sports video analysis is the process of using video footage to analyse and evaluate athletic performance. It involves capturing video footage of an athlete or team during a game, practice, or training session, and then using specialized software to analyse and break down the footage into specific events, actions, or movements.

Sports video analysis can provide coaches and athletes with valuable insights into their performance, such as identifying areas for improvement, tracking progress over time, and developing strategies for future games or competitions. It can also be used to scout opponents, analyze game strategies, and identify patterns and trends in performance.

We spoke to UK Sports Institute Performance Analyst Amber Luzar about how analysis of the video footage she collects improves performance in her role with the GB and England women’s hockey team.

How do you analyse the video footage?

“Mainly, my role involves capturing footage whether it’s of ourselves or the opposition and breaking that down into different events that happen in the game,” said Amber.

“We code it all and break it down into all the different key performance indicators and then produce statistical reports off the back of that. We can then go through those reports and reference the statistics to our expected standards of play and look for opposition trends.

“We try and quantify what we think we’re seeing so that we can challenge or confirm what the coaches already think they can see and give the coaching messages a bit more value and backing. From that we can also inform decision making and evaluate whether the way we’re playing is actually giving us a good outcome or do we ned to look back on what we’re doing and adjust things slightly. It’s about providing some objectivity to what we’re seeing.”

How is data communicated back to athletes?

“We don’t tend to give the athletes any of their individual statistics. When statistics are taken out of context they are completely worthless, so we don’t want players getting too hung up on certain values. Mainly the information that I provide is for the coaches and they then filter that down in their coaching language to what the players need to know. We give them some team stats as we are very transparent about what we’re trying to achieve, and the players know what benchmarks we are trying to hit.”

What can be tracked during sports video analysis?

“We collect more or less every event that happens in a match but the circle defence and attack are our main focusses. We have a lot of performance indicators which are related to being in the circle and we mainly break it down into defending and attacking structures. The attacking ones might be: how many circle possessions we have in a match and the quality of those circle possessions- meaning how dangerous they were.

“We do this for every circle possession and that gives us an estimate of how effective we are. When we’re defending, we look at our defensive effectiveness too, such as how we stop the opposition getting into our circle and limiting the number of positive outcomes they generate. We also track tackles, interceptions and how far up the pitch the events took place.”

“The goal keepers in our team are very good and are hungry to learn. Short corners are their domain and they will make the call as to what defensive play we do off the basis of what they’ve watched and what players they see in certain positions at the top of the D and where the player might try and shoot from. The goalkeepers also try and pick up different cues as to how that player moves as they will try and disguise what they’re trying to do.

“One of the main responsibilities in my role is collecting the footage for every short corner that we do as well as the opposition. I then upload the footage to a database where we have a different folder for the attacking and defensive corners for different countries.”

What is your role in the upcoming Commonwealth Games?

“As we get closer to a tournament, as a team we focus a bit more on our short corners and the opposition corners. The players will come in and watch the opposition in our pool- it’s for me to make sure we have the most up to date footage as possible. This usually involves swapping footage with opposition analysts, so it’s important to make friends.

“Competitions are very full on as I am required to film every opposition match, so I’ll be at the stadium all day every day. I can go quite a few days where I may not see many of the players of my team!”

What is a typical day in your video analysis role?

“At Bisham Abbey where we are based, the players have five pitch sessions a week and part of my role is to capture and tag the sessions so we can monitor how we’re getting on. On one day for example, we have a pitch session in the morning. The training session usually requires me to film and code the session and live stream it so what I capture can be sent down to the coach on an iPad and they can then do live reviews with the players. I’ll then come back to the office and upload the session to the server. Our analysis room has eight iMacs which the players can use to review sessions and they may ask me a couple of questions.

“We also have an afternoon session which is an inter-squad game and I set that up like I would a full match. I am radioed to the coaches, so they may ask me to clip off something and directly after the game they’ll take the players into a meeting room and use that footage to debrief the training sessions and whether we achieved what we are trying to achieve, so the feedback is as instant as we can get it.”

Learn more about the UK Sports Institute’s performance analysis services.