How video analysis is used to improve performance with GB and England Hockey

Ahead of the Commonwealth Games on the Gold Coast this April, we spoke to EIS Performance Analyst Amber Luzar about what her role entails with the GB and England women’s hockey team and how analysis of the footage she collects improves performance.

“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.”

Amber explained how analysis of the footage she collects is communicated down from the coaches to the players.

“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.”

When you want to highlight certain occurrences in a game or in training, it is known as tagging. Amber explains what events she might be looking to tag during a game.

“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.”

We ask Amber what analysis the goalkeepers, as the last line of defence, may do and what they have to be aware of.

“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.”

With the Commonwealth Games around the corner, Amber describes what her job will entail.

“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!”

We asked Amber to describe a typical day in her role during a block of training for the squad.

“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.”

Finally, Amber looks forward to the upcoming Commonwealth’s and believes the team have what it takes to improve on their silver medal achieved in Glasgow in 2014.

“Where we’re staying is a couple of miles from the beach and it’s walking distance to the pitch which is great as at the Rio Olympics we were about a 45-minute drive away.

“A lot of teams in the tournament like Australia and New Zealand are very physical in their play. Australia also missed out on qualifying for the World League Finals back in November, so they’ll have something to prove in their home tournament.

“However, I believe we have a very prepared, dedicated squad and we have the talent to go all the way.”