The GPS chip that is guiding England World Cup strategy

Real-time data from device in players’ shirts helps coaches to ensure squad are in peak form

RUGBY NEWS CORRESPONDENT in Kobe Details of the state-of-the-art technology that is helping Eddie Jones select his England side and manage the physical demands of a four-day turnaround between their opening two World Cup matches can be revealed for the first time.

The technology, which is used by leading football teams including Liverpool and Manchester United, is providing the England coaching staff with comprehensive real-time data to minimise the risk of injuries ahead of tomorrow’s match against the United States.

Data sourced by a GPS chip embedded in the players’ shirts, which is provided by Statsports, a company offering analysis for elite sports teams, covers everything from the g-force of collisions to metres run per minute and how much pressure a player is putting on each leg when he runs. The information can inform Jones of the level of fatigue suffered by each of his players and how they should be managed in the four days between the games against Tonga and the US. It is also being used to enable the squad to peak for key pool matches against Argentina and France.

“Players wear a pod worn in a vest under their shirts with the GPS and an accelerometer, which measures up to 900 times per second,” Sean O’connor, the company’s co-founder and chief operations officer, told The Daily Telegraph.

“If a player hits the ground, it measures the stress on their body. If players are running in a straight line you can tell if they are putting more stress on their left or right foot. If they are fresh and healthy, it will be 50-50.

“People will often make the mistake of using distance covered as an invaluable number for analysing how hard players work, but it is only one measure and you have to take it in context. You obviously have game factors. It could be a dogged game or weather factors could be brought into it. But metres-per-minute gives a coach a better idea of the intensity a player is experiencing over an extended period. If it is dropping and it is not due to the game itself slowing up, that gives you an idea that their personal intensity is dropping.”

The data can include a figure called “dynamic stress load”, which is the sum of all the forces that a player is under during a match. The figure includes everything from running to the extreme forces generated by acute collisions.

That figure, and the wider data collected, varies by position. For example, there is a speed threshold set for each position which differentiates between “high-speed runminute ning” and “collision-load analysis”, illustrating the different information needed for assessing between a back-three player and a front-row forward.

England’s coaches have access to that information and can also monitor each player’s “maximum intensity period” – normally around three to four minutes – which forms a critical baseline both for pre-tournament conditioning and managing workload between matches. If the number dips, then it could suggest that a player may need to be rested or carefully managed to ensure his fitness levels remain high.

“Once you peel back each layer, the next thing is to examine the impact of those three minutes for the subsequent three minutes,” O’connor said. “Is the player dead on their feet afterwards, for example, when that would actually then become a risk? So what we then looked at was how many times could a player then get what we called “sub-max” [ just under the highest intensity] intense periods.

“If a player has an intense period of ‘X’, then how many times were they able to get within 85 per cent of that again? If a player can have a really big three minutes, but then does not really add anything else for 10 or 15 minutes after that, then that is a concern.

“The data can show the threemax intensity for each player from multiple Test matches,” O’connor said. “The training then would be around preparing them to play beyond those three minutes, at an even more intense period.”

O’connor says the information provided by the system will have been crucial to England’s planning for their four-day turnaround. He said the workload management this week would have been based on each player’s “fingerprint” of data gathered during previous Test matches and training sessions, although Jones told The Telegraph yesterday that “common sense” still played a key part in his decisionmaking process.

England are one of 12 teams at the World Cup using the Statsports “Apex” technology, including Pool C rivals the US, France and Argentina, as well as Ireland and South Africa. O’connor, whose company is based in Newry, in Northern Ireland, and has been working with England since 2010, says the teams will be using the data to help them peak.

“How you get each player to that peak will be different and tailored to each individual,” said O’connor, who founded his company in 2008 along with partner Alan Clarke.

“Some players will be able to go harder and faster and some will need a more gradual approach. That is where this technology and data helps individualised training programmes and approaches to health, well-being and performance.

“They will have expected outcomes that they will want their players to target and because our live data is beyond what anyone else has, they will be able to stand on the side of the training field with ipads and say ‘We want players to go to X today’, for example in terms of distance, high-intensity metres or sprint accelerations.

“That means that you never get the situation where teams leave it on the training field. You want them just doing enough to expose them to the level they want to get to.

“The last thing you want is coming in after a training session and you couldn’t see the data live and the coaches then realising they had done far more work than they intended to.”