Impact on globalisation game and history seven rugby

Another key area strongly impacted by technology is concussions. This has been a focus of technological developments aiming to better prevent and monitor them across various contact sports. Historically, pitch-side doctors rely on player honesty for their risk assessment when deciding whether the player should return to play. By having impact detection technology closer to the centre of the skull doctors can paint a more accurate picture of the forces involved in each impact.

Thanks to this technology, coaches are now able to assess the forces exerted by players during drills and adjust the practice accordingly to avoid undetected head injuries. This type of tracking technology could eventually help develop a digital passport of historical head impact data for individual players, which can help them lengthen their careers by preventing early retirement due to poorly treated head injuries.

Source: Opro Mouthguards. Further advancements in the use of technology to prevent concussions were introduced as recent as five years ago across the world of rugby.

This system collected neurocognitive information that medical staff can review to determine if a player suffered a concussion. They transferred the data on the players involved, incidents and medical assessments to the data analytics platform Domo via an API , where the various datasets would be joined up in one single consolidated platform for further analysis.

Source: The Times. Successful rugby unions like New Zealand Rugby have started considering the balance between data and intuition.

Their performance analysis department now operates in a highly dynamic technological environment where it provides its teams the ability to quickly analyse data for performance insights. It enabled them to obtain a formal data management process that consolidated all real-time match data, post-match data and data retrieved through third party data providers in one unified and centralised platform. Technology is considered a supportive tool in the background to help inform decisions by bringing context and evidence to conversations, but not take over them.

He suggested that data has had a key role for him in seeing what is important and deciding where to invest in to build the strength of your squad. England Rugby benefits from an extensive analytics team that provides post-match analysis but also real-time tactical suggestions to coaches during matches. The department implemented a philosophy of always looking for the winning edge. For instance, they aim to discover winning trends such as the now well-established theory that the use an effective kicking game tends to lead to more successful match outcomes, a theory now considered a basic principles in the sport.

Moreover, Rugby Australia also entered the world of data analytics by partnering with Accenture to develop a bespoke high-performance unit HPU analytics platform using Accenture's Insights Platform AIP that consolidated all their data activities. As data ecosystems have become more complex with numerous sources and purposes for different datasets, Rugby Australia was able to integrate data, deliver insights and enable users in a single platform that provides a smarter and more automated approach that has led to a more effective way to manage their data assets.

The growth of data management systems and processes has also extended beyond unions. Overtime, media, consultancies, tech companies and clubs themselves are beginning to gather larger amounts of data of the game in an attempt to develop big data capabilities. For instance, Accenture and RBS developed an analytical package for the Six Nations tournament that contained six million data points per match. IBM and the RFU also performed a similar exercise by developing a predictive analytics software, TryTracker, to forecast the outcome of a game by mining data from historical rugby matches obtained from Opta.

However, when it comes to professional clubs, data is increasingly more custom-made by the clubs themselves to tailor for particular coaching philosophies and needs, as well as team-specific insights. Most clubs will receive data from third-party providers like Opta at a certain level of granularity, but will then gather their own internal data often at a much deeper level.

They create their own datasets where they might even analyse the technique of every single player in the team individually. For example, teams may track a more detailed view of their defense, detailing the dominance of each tackle.

Coaches can also have an input in data captured by providing their expert insights as additional data points. In December , a study by Andrew Manley and Shaun Williams from the University of Bath triggered a new debate of whether the essence of the sport i. Players are, allegedly, increasingly concerned about the use of modern technology to provide clubs with greater surveillance and pressure to perform over them.

The qualitative study by Manley and Williams interviewed 10 professional rugby players and asks them about their experience with data and technology at their club. According to the players interviewed, the open exposure of individual statistics created a climate of fear of public embarrassment when failing to meet personal performance indicators.

The club had also developed a global Work Efficiency Index for each player that was derived from 70 different variables describing a players positive and negative actions and physical condition. The use of this new metric by the club extended all the way to contract negotiations.

Players started to obsess over this metric, prioritising it above their individual impact to the overall team performance. On the field, they also became risk adverse to avoid negatively impacting their specific stats defined by the clubs. They feared being called-out by coaches and judged by teammates during post-match reviews.

Even then, performing well in individual stats had other negative effects on team dynamics. Players with positive individual stats had incentives to take it easy and ignore the additional contribution they could bring to the team after they ticked all the boxes. Players also found the introduction of technology to be invasive in nature. Some of the features of this app included the monitoring of weight management.

The club had even introduced fines if players failed to meet their body weight targets set in the system. Additionally, the new machine mentality at the club had coaches increasingly turning to technology to zoom in on the deficiencies affecting individual and team performance as a response to the pressures of a growing fan-base and increasing commercial interests of owners and sponsors that demand an acceleration to title success. Players felt that the excessive use of technology had introduced a Big Brother surveillance on players and was used as a coercive method of ensuring that players meet institutional objectives.

Data and technology had simply become standard practice in elite coaching of modern rugby. However, players felt that these unrelenting practices of constantly monitoring had harmful consequences to their playing and private lives, as well as relationship with coaches, which had not yet been addressed.

In their interviews, they argued that technology has enable coaches to formalize a regime of power, with the risks of turning the humanistic approach of coaching into pure data engineering. Other critics of the use of technology argue that Rugby Union is losing its way due to data.

According to them, individual wizardry and innate empathy in the sport created from the unpredictability in the game is suppressed by those digital data profiles created by analysts and coaches that players are constantly trying to meet.

John Mudge was so very good at the game he was seconded from his Eastern Suburbs at Sydney team by renowned Welsh Rugby League player footballer, and successful coach Gus Risman — This was all taking place at a time when the onset of changes to the game would see Rugby becoming a professional team sport. There has been a book written to commemorate their victories, which is available on bookoffers. My eldest sister 19 years older than me followed him to Northumberland, where they married and lived for nearly a decade while he completed his contract.

Skipper Gus Risman steered his beloved Workington Town to victory in the Championship in and to a famous Challenge Cup victory at Wembley in , becoming the oldest ever Cup winner at the age of In the Challenge Cup at the Empire Field, which was later named the Wembley Stadium, John scored the longest ever-running try encompassing the length of the field.

It was also the first football game televised and although old and scratchy it still exists. His achievement was a major turning point for his team in the match and he held the record right up until , when Wembley Stadium was demolished to make way for a whole new structure.

They were representing the Empire of Britain at the time. John became heavily involved in coaching and encouraging young people to participate in all types of sport, becoming a mentor to many young Rugby players. During the last few months of his life John Mudge was invited to England to attend the closing ceremony of the old Wembley Stadium.

Its famous twin towers were demolished in the name of progress. In his fourteen years at the Rugby School Dr Arnold had put in place an educational system that would have a large effect nationally and then worldwide with colonial settlement.

They would go on to have a huge impact on wider society and establishing firmly in its psyche a sense of what should be considered fair and what constituted right and proper behaviour for any young man of consequence. All over England as boys read the book the demand for a football game played fairly, and on even terms, took off like wildfire. The honour of playing the game, and of winning the game, took centre stage for generations of young men wanting to achieve.

Laws were debated and the rules, which were written down at the Rugby school by three senior pupils, were discussed. Over the coming years they would be subjected to constant change and eventually codified by a committee set up to review and revise them annually if required. Routledge Research in Sport, Culture and Society. Stewart, Jeremy ; Keech, Marc. The Rugby World in the Professional Era.

UK : Routledge, Stewart J , Keech M. UK: Routledge.