Five benefits of tagging your matches

Five benefits of tagging your matches

What is Match Tagging?

Before looking at the Five benefits of tagging your matches, let’s have a quick look at “what is Match Tagging?”.

Tagging your matches is a process of creating a timeline of events that happen in the match you want to analyse. This is generally done by an analyst who watches a video of your match. The analyst will use a Code Window which contains buttons that represent match events and that are pressed at the time an event in a match happens.

An example of this might be a penalty that happens in your match; the analyst would press the penalty button (in the iSportsAnalysis system we call this button an Action).
In this example your analysts would press the penalty Action, the penalty Action might have Tags associated to it; for example Red card, Yellow card and player name.

Your Code Window is made up of all of the events, both the Actions and the Tags, that you, your coach and your analyst will use when tagging your matches.
The Code Window Actions and Tags reflect the events deemed important to the game-plans and strategies put in place by your coaches.

1. Gain an overview of your team’s performance

After tagging your matches, report pages can be generated and used to analyse performances. The reports can contain metrics which may include home possession, away possession, goals and penalties. The reports can also demonstrate more detailed information such as areas of attack and defense.

Reports can provide a detailed picture of your team performances, their strengths and their weaknesses.

An example of this might be that if your team has performed well they will spend more time in the attacking areas rather than the defending areas, and that might reflect in the number of goals scored; it might not if the opposition are strong in defence, and this can also show in your reports if taken into consideration when tagging your matches.

Another example might be that you use Match Tagging and the report pages to measure the effectiveness of strategies. For example, you can generate reports which observe anything from players movements to team’s tactical patterns which help us to recognise problems and indicate how to solve them.

2. Gain insights into your oppositions performance

Match Tagging is primarily used to look at how you can improve your team and player performances, however, you can also use Match Tagging to analyse your opposition.
You can analyse their strategies and the effectiveness of their game plans, and you can compare how your opposition’s game plans and strategies are working against your own game plans and strategies.

If you observe a team who has strengths in areas that your team doesn’t you can learn from, and even adopt their strategies. You can look at effective ways for your team to beat your opponents completely based on data.
As well as looking at the overview of your team performances, it can be as important to observe and to gain insights into your oppositions performances.

3. Improve your team’s game plans and strategies

After tagging your matches and analysing your team performances, and possibly analysed your opposition’s performances, your generated reports help to build on strengths and improve areas of weakness. This is as effective for individual players as it is for the performance of the whole team.

Using data over a period of time builds an accurate comparison of the effectiveness of your team’s game plans against their opposition teams.
Areas of team and player strength and weakness can become more obvious helping to improve and optimise performances.

4. Demonstrate team improvements

Having worked on areas of weakness and improved team strategies, it’s important to be able to demonstrate the effectiveness of how Match Tagging and analysis is improving performance.
If your team is winning more matches that is an obvious demonstration of the effectiveness of tagging your matches. But “why” are they winning more matches? Are they better at defending? Are they better at attacking? Are the strategies more obvious to players and therefore more easily actioned?

It is important to understand what is working, and why – and it is important to understand what isn’t working and why and it is essential to be able to show this to your teams.

From a team building and team motivating perspective, demonstrating improvements that are based on After tagging your matches, builds team confidence, both in themselves and in their coaches.
If your team can see how updates to game plans and strategies are helping them to improve performances it helps them to stay focused, motivated and builds trust in the coach.

5. Improve coaching skills

As a coach, if you use Match Tagging to gain insights into your team’s performances, gain insights into your opposition’s performances, use that information to improve your team’s performances and are able to demonstrate the improvements, it helps improve and build on coaching skills.

The more metrics you have to indicate where your team needs to improve tactically, where your team strengths are and where your team’s weaknesses are, the more focused your coaching can be.

The more you can use data to demonstrate what you’re saying as a coach, the more effective your coaching can be. If you can show something using a combination of video and Match Tagging reports, it can help you communicate ideas which helps improve your coaching skills and make you a better coach.

Conclusion

Match Tagging can be an essential tool in helping to optimise player and team performances.
Analysis and the reports generated from Match Tagging are as individual as the coach using them, there is no “one Code Window or Match Tagging report that fits all”.

Code Windows can be very simple containing only a few Actions, and they can be incredibly complicated with hundreds of Actions and Tags.

The time spend Tagging matches varies depending on how complicated the analysis. Match Tagging can be used to tag whole teams and it can be used to Tag individual players, and it can be used to Tag both!

Watch the video below to see Match Tagging reports on iSportsAnalysis: