It’s the Thursday of ‘Test Week’ and the squad and management all meet back up in camp after the usual Wednesday squad day off.
The day begins for us between 6.30am-7.00am where we will meet up in the Team Room at the Vale (or the dungeon as the analysts have christened it!)
First on the agenda is to set myself up for the day, going back through the last training sessions, refreshing my notes and feedback ready for when the coaches and players arrive for breakfast.
Each analyst in the department works with a specific coach as well as working on general aspects of play and studying the opposition. Myself, I work closely with Neil (Jenkins) and we will sit down in the morning and go through all the clips and notes we discussed earlier in the week so we have everything prepared for the players briefing later today.
The squad will come in for breakfast around 8am and they will come armed with the laptops they would have taken home after Tuesday’s session and we will run through any questions or updates they may have from reviewing training or the opposition.
Thursday is always a double day. That means the forwards and backs will train separately in the morning before coming together for the team session in the afternoon.
The morning will see the forwards training up in the National Centre of Excellence and I will be one of the team on the cameras filming and we will have three or four angels of training covered.
It’s then a tight turnaround to get down to the pitch for the backs’ session, where I will be behind a laptop. I will be collating the camera feeds coming in, cutting and coding the footage. All the plays, patterns and drills are filmed and coded live with the aim of all the training footage being available to the players as soon as they get back to the team room.
Over lunch it’s a chance to review training with Neil. We will run through the positives and negatives from training always with an eye on the opposition and tailoring what we do to that match.
As a department we spend a lot of time reducing clips and information down to allow players to access exactly that they need rather than trawling through to many hours of footage or data!
Before the afternoon session the coaches will talk through training, our plays and tactics, using clips from training and previous matches. All the analysis department are down pitchside for the team session, I will be filming, Rhods (Rhodri Bown) will be coding live onto the laptop and Longy (Rhys Long, Head of Performance Analysis) will be reviewing training live with an iPad pitch-side, providing immediate clarity and updates to the coaching team.
Again all the footage will be up on the server for the boys by the time they head back to the team room. We are then on hand to help review the session and run through any questions.
Neil and I will discuss any clips he wants to show specific players or groups of players and run through the key stats.
Throughout the day we would have also spent time looking at the opposition and trends they may have, again to provide clarity to the squad and coaches.
During the evening we will be on hand to the squad whilst working on the next fixture and preparing the analysis for that. We try to keep two weeks ahead of schedule so that whenever the squad are ready to look ahead all the information is at hand.Â
The squad stay in camp this evening and the day will begin all over again tomorrow with another 6.00am start.
