Ulster Rugby v Harlequins

GETTING TO KNOW: NIALL MALONE

All the top sports teams use data and video analysis to manage players’ performance these days and Ulster Rugby is no exception. We caught up with Performance Analyst and Skills Coach, Niall Malone, to find out how his role helps shape the development of the Ulster men.

“The week for me flows from the match night,” explains Malone. “I do all the capture of the games and set up all the computers so that we have a live feed of the game so that we can review and identify areas for improvement after. “I work on these recordings of the game at the weekend, pulling together facts and figures for the coaches and Ryan (Dennison) helps with coding the individuals. From this footage we present a review to the players of how we think they played on Monday morning, then we preview the next team that we are scheduled to play that week and start analysing their game.” As Malone shares, the purpose of his role is to collect data and give the coaches as much insight as possible into how their own players and the opposition play. “Team-wise, we’ll look at some general points that we need to bring through in a group presentation - what we think will be effective against our next opponents and what we thought worked really well against our previous opponents. We work with individual players as well. If for example, there’s a player doing something particularly well or particularly badly, we would do one-to-ones with that player.” Former Ireland out-half Malone started his coaching career with Ulster as a Skills Coach in the Abbey Insurance Academy, before taking control of video analysis. “When I started there wasn’t a huge amount of video analysis being done and as it was coming in bit by bit, someone needed to manage it and I volunteered. When I was playing and coaching I had always tried to think quite deeply about things so the role is a good fit for me and it just kind of snowballed from small beginnings. “There was an opportunity for the senior team and because I’d been doing analysis for the Academy for a few years and it’s such a niche

area of work, I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.” The use of video analysis has brought rugby to a new level, providing insights which can help teams develop successful game plans, but Malone admits that some value it more than others. “In his end-of-season speech after his retirement, Roger Wilson joked that he wasn’t sure what my job was as he never did any analysis. It was a bit tongue-in-cheek but it made me laugh. He’d been a brilliant player for a long time and I genuinely don’t know if he would have improved with analysis. “I think the new age players are more receptive to the concept. You hear them coming back from Ireland camp and the amount of analysis and skills work that they do there is just incredible. Analysis used to be an add-on but now it’s very much a core part of your development as a rugby player. “You notice a difference in the quality of understanding from players who are heavily invested in analysis versus those who don’t do any. Those who do a lot of analysis have a deeper understanding of the game and what we are trying to achieve through analysis.” While collecting data can be important, it is not enough - the interpretation and presentation of that to the players is the key. Whatever your opinion on the validity of video analysis it cannot be denied that all the analysis in the world is worthless if it doesn’t get translated into something useful on the pitch, in training, or when player scouting. As Malone says, when it is translated into something useful, that is what makes his job so enjoyable. “If we work on something very specific and then we do it on the pitch at the weekend and it is

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