Original article written by Paul Talty, Kevin McGuigan, Mark Quinn, and Paul Jones
Background
Time-motion analysis means analysing match play to describe the demands of the sport. In this study, the researchers analysed video footage. With this analysis, different types of activities are described, and the frequency of their occurrence can used by practitioners to assist with the prescription of training or the design of sport-specific tests. Gaelic football is an invasion sport played in Ireland, and involves multi-directional high-speed running, accelerations, decelerations, kicking, catching, and tackling. It is played with a round ball on a rectangular pitch with 15 players a side including a goalkeeper. The purpose of this study was to examine the agility demands of elite Gaelic football by conducting a time-motion analysis.
What the authors did
The authors modified the Bloomfield Movement Classification[1] from soccer so it could outline types of movements, intensity of movements, whether they were on the ball or off the ball, the direction of turns, and various angles at which turns were made. They analysed 5 players from 4 elite Gaelic football teams with a total of 200 minutes of match play.
What the authors found
There were a total of 5,499 total actions recorded and 1,899 of these (34.5%) were change of direction actions. This shows that evasion and agility is very common in Gaelic football. An important finding was that nearly all the turns (97%) were between 0-180 degrees, with the vast majority (72%) being less than 90 degree turns. The number of turns to the left or right was fairly equal.
Limitations
One limitation was that only 5 players were analysed from 200 minutes of match play footage. The reason for this is that it took about 3 hours to analyse 5 minutes of video footage. This means that the results may not be generalisable to the entire Gaelic football competition. A second limitation is that the researchers didn’t break down the agility actions into different techniques such as side-stepping, cross-over cutting etc. Another limitation is that the agility actions were not classified as either attacker or defender actions.
What this means for coaches
For designing agility training for Gaelic football, it is important to target the actions that are used in competition. Therefore, this study tells us that changes of direction to the left and right should be trained fairly equally, and the majority of turns in training should be quite shallow (less than 90 degrees). The same guidelines apply to selecting agility tests if you want the test to represent what occurs in match play.
Reviewer’s comments
Because Gaelic football is a unique sport with different demands to other football codes, we can’t simply apply the results to other sports. Gaelic football is what I would describe as a 360 degree sport, where the players and the ball are allowed to travel in any direction. Other sports like this include soccer and Australian Rules football, so these sports tend to have a lot of diverse and complex agility actions. Sports such as rugby union or rugby league probably have more restricted agility actions, so I would encourage practitioners to seek out time-motion studies relating to your sport to inform your training and testing.
Recommended resources
- Article – Change of direction frequency off the ball: new perspectives in elite youth soccer – Oliver Morgan and colleagues
- Article – Agility training is more than just change of direction training – Warren Young
- Podcast – Agility training, problems with change of direction testing & game speed – Ian Jeffreys