Pat Lam and rugby stats
Pat Lam was at the Web Summit in Dublin earlier this month to talk about the use of data in coaching. It was a short talk, as they all were on the Sport stagei. I had a chat with Lam afterwards, seated on a leather couch in the spiegeltent that served as the speakers’ lounge at PaddyCosgravePalooza.
We talked for a while about analysis and coaching philosophy, and then I talked to a few analysts, including Pat’s man at Connacht, to get a view on their job, the use of data in the job and the relationship with coaches: George Murray (Munster), Brett Igoe (formerly Leinster and Scotland) and Conor McPhillips (Connacht).
What was performance analysis like in Pat Lam’s playing days? “We’d probably just sit in the bar talking about the game,” the Connacht coach told an RDS audience earlier this month. “It started to be introduced once we hit professionalism but it was nowhere near as detailed as it is now.”
Last summer the LA Lakers hired a liaison to sit between their analysts and coaching staff. To manage the pipeline of ideas, apparently. One could view such an appointment in a number of ways – were the analysts generating so many bursts of number-driven genius that the coaching staff were overwhelmed? Or did the coaching staff need somebody to sit between the two, translating numbers into coach-speak?
Whatever one’s view, there is one core truth: all the analysis in the world isn’t worth a damn if it doesn’t get translated into something useful on the pitch, the training paddock or player scouting.
At the Web Summit earlier this month the Connacht coach talked about the use of data and analysis in the coaching set-up, and Lam took some time later to chat with The Irish Times.
The former Samoan international said that while atAuckland he’d learned how to code his own match video. Then to Connacht, where the resident analyst had the same software. “I arrived and I said, ‘great, where’s mine?’”
There was no software budget for Lam, and he found his analyst working in a cell. “Honestly. In a room. Solid brick. Just like a jail cell. And three or four players all bunched in.”
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