Rugby leads the pack as the technology race heats up
The transformation of the Sapporo Dome in Toyohira-ku, Japan, is a remarkable thing. The 40,000-seat stadium, where England triumphed in their Rugby World Cup opener against Tonga on Sunday, is usually reserved for local baseball team Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters.
But ahead of the contest, Sapporo’s baseball field was removed and a retractable pitch, used for rugby and football, slid in from outside. The pitch pirouettes into place, seats are shifted and the stadium is ready for a new sport in just eight hours.
It is a feat of architectural and technological innovation you might expect from the Japanese. Rugby continues to be part of the forward pack when it comes to sporting technology.
According to a report in April by research group Markets and Markets, the sports tech market was worth £7 billion ($13.5b) in 2018 and is set to grow to £25b ($48.5b) by 2024 and several start-ups are turning to rugby as fertile ground.
Northern Irish analytics company STATSports for instance is providing “Apex” GPS technology to England’s rugby team to measure a host of different physical data points including distance covered, speeds reached and heart rate.
As part of the drive to monitor players’ health through technology, global representative body International Rugby Players (IRP) has also assigned elite players a “loadpassport” ahead of this year’s contest.
This is essentially an app used by players to log training sessions and matches as they move between club and international rugby, allowing them to keep track of their workload in a move to avoid “chronic burnout”.
“The idea is that it is playerdriven,” said Omar Hassanein, IRP chief executive. “Aside from just the strength and conditioning coach taking responsibility for that aspect, the players also manage their own load passport — essentially through an app — and they try to track their own load management.” It is not the only technology in rugby looking to help with the sport’s considerable force. Players have worn concussion sensors on their ears, while Scottish start-up LiveSkin Sports, founded by Edinburgh University alumni Jack Ng and Charlie Patterson, have created wearable intelligent sensors worn under jerseys that can measure the impact of tackles.
The sensors send analysis of the force of impact and the muscles used to a connected app. In theory, this can then be used to improve a player’s technique when it comes to tackling or scrummage and help medical staff plan a player’s recuperation after training or rehabilitation after injury.
As well as fitness and well-being, new technology is also being employed by World Cup coaches to fine-tune tactics. Namely: drones. From Scotland and England to Samoa and Fiji, a vast array of World Cup teams are using flying cameras to record training sessions, plan attacking line breaks and set-pieces and identify weaknesses in their scrum from above.
“I think we could have been the first union to use them,” said Scotland team manager Graham Scott.
“It gives you the one thing you want, which you don’t get from a single camera, which is the space in between players, and the space in behind players.
‘‘If you want a tactical view, the drone is the shot to have.”
Analysts and coaches can then cut individual clips for players’ positioning, even providing advisory voice-overs on a player-by-player basis.
And in a sport of fine margins, ferocious force and often complex rulings, accurate enacting of the laws is essential.
In Japan, Basingstoke-based company Hawkeye Innovations — perhaps more recognised for its use in tennis and cricket — is further expanding the use of its video technology to aid rugby referees.
Hawkeye now provides the technology for the Television Match Official (TMO), able to review video replays from a myriad of angles to aid the on-pitch referee in close calls. Previously, the TMO was able to review footage only from the television broadcasters, but the expanded technology — first introduced at the 2015 World Cup in England — gave officials greater control over incidents.
But Hawkeye’s use at the World Cup is not just to judge whether a ball was grounded properly for a try or not. The match feeds are used by “stats loggers” to more accurately deliver analytics. And perhaps most pressingly, as rugby wrestles with its problems with concussion, Hawkeye will also provide real-time footage to team medics wielding tablets pitchside and doctors in treatment rooms to help identify and diagnose injuries.
And what about the humble observer?
While watching rugby has been enhanced by the use of the TMO to help spectators understand tight calls and technology like Hawkeye providing big screens and hospitality suites with more angles, there is more tech developed with the crowd and television viewers in mind.
Japanese camera company Canon, for example, has developed a 3D replay system for games at the International Stadium in Yokohama which captures action from multiple viewpoints.
This image data is then processed to allow a virtual camera to move around the 3D space, placing viewers on to the pitch.
And in the future, we could see new “goal-light” technology created by Michael Press. Should the goal attempt miss, the lights will flash red.
According to Press, this addresses an issue in rugby where occasionally it can be difficult to see the success of a goal attempt in a sprawling stadium.
Currently it is activated manually when the line-judges raise their flags to signal a successful kick. But in the future it is easy to see the technology adapted to work when a ball sails through (or wide of ) the posts.
Some purists may scoff at the adoption of such technology. But time and again, rugby has shown itself as a grand old sport willing to adopt new innovations to improve the game for players, officials and spectators alike.
A challenge rugby will undoubtedly continue to tackle.
Telegraph Group Ltd