How a computer could decide England’s fortunes in the Six Nations

There is something powerfully ancient about the game of rugby: for as long as there have been people, surely, they have locked together in fierce and physical clashes to decide who among them is the fearsome. It is a game of grit and muscle, won by the people most gifted with heft and speed and the skill to use those things to their own advantage. There might, in short, be nothing less obviously technological, even if the work is intensely technical.

That’s clear as the England team practice their scrum at their training camp outside of Girona, days before the beginning of the Six Nations and the team’s first match, against Wales. The heaving, hefty mass of 16 of the strongest men in the country binding together in an astonishing crush; incredible amounts of human force matched only by the equally incredible amounts of human force on the other side of the scrum. A 32-legged monster set against itself, giving everything to go barely anywhere.

But look up above this sunlit, war-like field and you will see something altogether more dainty. There, in the sky, hovers a drone, looking down on that scrum with elegant exactitude. And up on a hill at the side of the field, watching from afar, stands the drone’s headquarters: an assembled group of cameras, computers and coaches ready to analyse that power with pinpoint precision.

This is the modern game of rugby: powerful players backed by equally powerful equipment, aimed at analysing that team to ensure they are the best they can be. The array of equipment is vast: not only hovering above the field, but on it and beside it, too. Dotted around the training field are a series of iPads, offering instant replays. Up above the training field, on that hill, stands a series of cameras all feeding their video into a set of MacBooks. Analysts sit at those computers, marking up the footage as it arrives so that it can be watched by coaches and turned into immediate feedback for those players.

This kind of analysis isn’t new, of course; that’s what coaches do. But what is new is the technology that powers it: the robustness and the speed of the technology means that the analysis can be provided instantly, and the players can react as it happens.

“There’s a lot of analysis that goes into it these days, and it’s analysis of the opposition but more importantly analysis of us as well. So we review training hard, we review games hard,” says George Ford, an England fly-half.

“And obviously what the tech does is just make that process a lot easier, cleaner, simpler for us. The ability to just upload stuff on iPhones, iPads, whatever it might be – we’re just picking up and off we go straight away,” says Ford, who at age 32 is among the more senior members of the team, a role he embraces by helping out with tactics and with training.

“I think the biggest thing that’s changed – and the most impressive thing these days – is how live that can be. Which helps us as players, because say if we’re training or playing then the analysis guys can show us straight away what it looks like, as it’s happening. So then hopefully we can adapt stuff and find solutions quicker than we did in the past.”

Ford points to the training that’s taking place behind him, that afternoon. As they work on defending, for instance, analysts are watching to ensure that they are properly covering space, if they’re reacting to the right triggers and cues that show what an attacker might be doing. “If we’re not, then they’ll come over straight away and go: look, you need to be maybe five metres that way, and start your movement later. Because sometimes when you’re out there, you feel, but you don’t quite always see it like you can from above.

“Everything’s happening at 100 miles an hour and it’s sometimes hard to see where the space is. It’s difficult to see, or pull yourself out of the game to see the bigger picture, and that gives you a good idea if there’s anything that’s changing or even things you need to keep doing.”

When Ford was growing up, playing at 16 or 17, he got some of the same analysis but it took much longer. “You played on a Saturday, and you won’t see footage until Monday – whereas now, obviously, we’ve seen training while it’s going on, we’re seeing stuff in the game while it’s going on, never mind as you’ve finished. The biggest thing to change I just how instant it can be, how live it can be, and how helpful that is.

“Because the big thing I like doing is seeing if how we feel on the field matches up with what it looks like. Because sometimes you feel something completely different. You come off [the pitch] having a certain thought in your head as to why things happened, and then that might change entirely after you watch the analysis.”

For all of its bellicose heft, rugby can be decided in a matter of moments, and by a matter of metres. But the quick and complicated nature of the play means that understanding those very fine details can be difficult amid a mass of crashing limbs. That is made nowhere more clear than in the scrum, in which players are wrapped in each others’ arms and looking down, and so can struggle to understand exactly what went right and wrong. Once again, technology is improving that, by allowing players to see themselves from the outside. As the players engage with each other to train the scrum, two iPads sit on stands just metres away, ready to provide instant feedback.

“You need to create a connection between: this is what it looks like and this is how it feels – so that we can repeat it, repeat it, repeat it,” says Tom Harrison, a former player and now coach who oversees the scrum. “The scrum is eight blokes, doing the same thing at the same time, and it comes down to split seconds. So the ability to have it on a delayed replay” is key, he says. “There’s immediate feedback on the iPad – so they get up and they’re watching it. You’re giving that feedback from there, straight away.”

The speed of being able to do that work has been transformative, he says. Once, doing that analysis would mean loading it up into a computer, chasing them around the team hotel as they try to recover, “running around with laptops” trying to show players what happened that afternoon. Now, they are able to watch on iPads on a 20-second delay, ready to integrate what they learn not the next day but the next scrum.

There is a huge amount going on in a given rugby game, or training session. Some of the job of Carwyn ‘Caz’ Morgan and his analyst colleagues is knowing what not to look at, to ensure that they are giving proper attention to the right things. As such, they will know the aims of the session and will tailor their work around whatever the team are trying to improve.

“Because there is so much information, you have to sort of use that as an anchor to work towards. You want to look at everything – but it’s about guiding your attention to one specific thing” and seeing how the information is shaped around that, he says, likening it to looking at a specific part of a tree to get a sense of “how everything grows around it,” Morgan says.

The more important this analysis is, however, the more dangerous the loss of it might be. Once, that was a real threat: dying batteries, crashing computers, and a range of other threats meant that analysts had to be constantly aware of their limits. The improvements in the MacBooks they use – they point specifically to the recently introduced Apple Silicon, which dramatically improved not only the power of those computers but also their resilience – have meant that the feedback is not only quicker but much more reliable.

“We know it's going to work. Even four, five years ago – you weren't quite sure. And if you wanted to push and do a little more, like get an extra angle or something like that, you might crash the whole thing. The robustness has been massive,” Morgan says. A crashing computer could be the difference between winning and losing, he suggests, pointing to a game years ago in which things didn’t work properly.

“We've beating Wales in Cardiff, and things have gone really well,” he remembers. “But the second half we lost, and we couldn't answer the question of why. So we've had a massive push in the last three to four years: how can we be more intuitive? How can we be more engaged in this? That's the skill: to develop that and know what you're looking at.”

The England team are days out from their first game of the Six Nations, against Wales at Twickenham, which will set the tone for the whole competition, and in turn the team’s journey to the World Cup next year. And the training is not just for the players: the analysts too are preparing for that game.

The setup is largely the same in a real game, but the analysts don’t actually need to take video, since they have the six or sometimes eight broadcast feeds that are used to show the match streaming into their Macs, as well as third-party data that is arriving live and fed into custom dashboards. But, once again, the real work can be knowing where not to look.

That focus becomes more important than ever at half time in a big game. There are only 15 minutes to go around, and the coaches and analysts have to share that with all of the other demands on players’ time. Plus “you’ve got all the emotion, there’s a lot on the line”, Caz notes; “the teams are starting to feel each other a little bit”.

“This the only proper intervention you get, so it becomes a really critical piece,” he says. Having the right piece of video on hand to illustrate a coach’s point could be the difference between fixing it for the second half; that second half could be the difference between winning and losing; that could be what decides whether, for instance, England wins the World Cup, as the team hopes to next year. One clip, and one computer to find it, could be the point on which the whole rugby world turns.