Sky Blues analyst heads to Wales for top tips

Clifford Adams was promoted as United’s first official performance analyst after making the step up from his position last season as manager of Ballymena United Reserves, Clifford will be joining Glenn Ferguson’s first-team staff as he uses video footage and his Level 3 Award in Sports Performance Analysis to improve the performance of United’s players.

To gain valuable experience, Clifford and Jason Lear from Lear sports analysis made the journey to Wales Rugby Union headquarters to meet up with one of the world’s top performance analysts Rhys Long who is Wales Rugby Union Head of Performance.

“Rhys also served as Head of Performance Analysis on the British & Irish Lions tour of South Africa. Rhys has had success while at London Wasps winning the inaugural Anglo-Welsh Powergen Cup Final and in 2007 club rugby’s premier trophy the Heineken Cup, while with Wales they have won two Grand slams and came very close to reaching the Rugby World Cup final in 2011, the analysis still goes on in Wales on that one.

“Jason arranged the visit and invited myself along with the aim of continuing our professional development and understanding more about sports performance analysis in a professional set up and the highest levels of sport, the international arena. While Jason was seeking to enhance his own consultancy processes for me the vision was to see if some of the practices could be implemented at Ballymena Football Club.

“Some will say why rugby and not football? The simple answer is Wales rugby are known as having one of the best analysis and player development set ups in the world. Year on year they seem to produce young talent that appears to come from nowhere.

“After Monday I now realise this does not just happen by chance, there is structure in place to identify talent.”

He added: “We started our day getting picked up at Cardiff Central station by Jon Moore of Analysis Pro one of Jason’s associate consultancy companies located in Wales. Jon himself has coached internationally with Wales and the USA Eagles serving as a specialist scrummaging and forwards coach. He has also coached at elite club level with Bath Rugby in England. During Jon’s time at Bath they became one of the first professional clubs to dedicate a purpose built “war room”, explanation coming shortly. Jon now dedicates his time providing consultancy and advising National Governing Bodies to grass roots clubs on performance analysis systems and processes hence the relationship with Jason at Lear Training.

Now for the ‘war room’. It was while with Bath RFC in a his role as forward coach and video analyst, armed with analysis software and time to prepare reports, produce high quality video presentations Jon was able to load a server with all their own games, the oppositions games broken down into individual player clips players. Now Bath’s own players could find out everything about their own game and their opposition hence the name ‘the war room’. No stone went unturned and players would spend hours in it on the run up to match day so they were well versed on the opposition. The ‘war room’ has since become an integral part of club and international rugby coaching structures.

“Our first stop was the Cardiff Blues academy analysis suite where we met head of the blues academy analysis Jarrad Griffiths. His job is to analyse performance of academy players capturing data against key performance indicators and reporting on strengths and weaknesses of young players.

“Obviously this information also helps the coaches to focus on areas of player performance that needs attention. In Wales they make a lot of use of a system called TPE that is provided and supported by Jon Moore to cast a wide network across the playing base at a very young age right across individual regions.

“Jarrad was telling us as much time spent is now spent in the analysis suite as on the pitch, even at academy level they get the players to study their opposition and their own performance and self-evaluate rating themselves using TPE the athlete management system. It was evident within the room information is made very visible to make athletes aware of performance data. The early part of our day showed me one key thing, it’s amazing to see even from early primary school age how much time and effort is invested to try and produce top notch players for the Welsh National Team and how much they are seeking to build an infrastructure around the analysis process.

“Our next stop was Wales Rugby Union headquarters and what a superb facility it is with an indoor rugby pitch, along with a state of the art gym and a test centre for players to monitor anything and everything. Down the long corridor upstairs that overlooks the indoor pitch there lies Rhys’ office, a state of the art analysis suite where Rhys and his team produce the vast amounts of information for players to view on the wide screen monitors.

“Capturing and filtering in excess of 4000 thousand statistics in a game all linked to a video clip requires exceptional skills. Rhys recognises the role of performance/video analyst as a standalone role within the coaching team. He also recognises the need for structured education and discussed with Jason the opportunities that may exist for the WRU to embed the level 3 & 5 performance analysis qualifications he developed into their coaching programs. Listening to Rhys speak about his own road map from a self-trained analyst to achieving a masters in performance analysis you get the sense of passion he has for his profession and the belief he has that performance analysis really is that extra 2% at the elite level that can change a game. Clifford said he aims to use the techniques with the Sky Blues with the hope that it will give them the edge during the up coming season.”

He added: “It was a very factual trip and hopefully we can implement some of these techniques into our club for long term future success, I already have put in place a player monitoring system with the Ballymena youth academy this week so at the top of the club we can monitor the best young talent coming through and hopefully we can implement this through the other boys clubs in Ballymena so we have our finger on the pulse as regards to local talent and no one escapes from the system.

“Already as the past number of weeks I have brought Davy Douglas on board to assist me with the senior team.

Also I have brought in sports science student Sean McCullagh from Belfast who looks after all of the reserves analysis, just this week we have brought in local girl Lauren Brown from Kells who is studying sport and she will deal with all youth team analysis issues giving them as much information on players as she can to help with development.

“All the analysts send me weekly reports on all the young players so we can get a database of information built up and all the top performers are presented to the manger to keep a close eye on their development.”