Olympic Countdown - Basketball

Several international rugby forwards have developed their handling skills by playing basketball, including Simon Shaw and Courtney Lawes. I often think that it would help goalkeepers dealing with crosses as well.

Vickers (1996) found that elite basketball players concentrate their gaze on just one part of the target, such as the front of the hoop. In contrast, the gaze of lesser players tends to wander all around the target. But there’s a problem: at some stage the ball gets in the way.

There are actually two shooting styles. In the low style, the ball is brought up and blocks the view of the hoop on release. Players with this style must get all their information before the ball blocks their view. In the high style, the ball is brought up above head height before being released, allowing the hoop to be viewed as the shot is taken. These players can get “Quiet Eye” information right up to the moment when the ball is released.

Intuitively, one would have thought that the high style would have been more effective, but researchers so far have failed to find one method to be better than the other. This could be because laboratory conditions aren’t tough enough, for instance there are no opponents.

Or it could be that both styles are effective as long as you focus on one specific part of the target, and you do it as late as your preferred style allows.

David Donner

Another England Penalty Failure

This time it’s the ladies who’ve been knocked out of a World Cup on penalties. The usual response is to say that penalty shoot-outs are a lottery, and that it was just cruel misfortune. This time, however, manager Hope Powell blamed some of her players, accusing them of “cowardice”.

I have to say both responses are completely inappropriate. Taking and saving penalties are skills, like every other part of football. The secret of dealing with penalty shoot-outs is to prepare the players for the stress involved, so that they maintain the correct technique. You won’t be surprised to learn that the correct technique is all about vision, but more of that later.

Earlier on in the tournament, a BBC reporter had asked the manager if she was considering making any changes to her team for the game against New Zealand. Powell replied by saying this perfectly reasonable question was “ridiculous”. This struck me as a response of a manager feeling under pressure, and if that sense of anxiety communicated itself to the players, I suspected we were going to be in trouble.

I was also surprised to read this quote on the FA website from the manager after the France defeat. “We thought we had a chance with penalties because we’ve been practising and Karen Bardsley has been saving every single one”. Well, that might have done wonders for the goalkeeper’s confidence, but considering that a well-struck and directed penalty should be unsaveable, it clearly didn’t do much for those taking them. No wonder they weren’t rushing to volunteer.

There’s no doubt that taking a penalty for your country can be a very stressful experience. Here’s Steven Gerrard talking about his miss in the 2006 World Cup. “Jesus, I wish I was first up. Get it out of the way. The wait’s killing me…….Why do I have to wait for the bloody whistle? Those extra couple of seconds seemed like an eternity, and they definitely put me off”. Or Gareth Southgate in 2003 “All I wanted was the ball: put it on the spot, get it over and done with”. Or Chris Waddle in 1997 “I just wanted it to be over”. These players appear to be suffering from a form of emotional distress, and the natural reaction is to try and get it over with as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this can mean less attention on the task required.

There are two strategies when it comes to taking penalties. In the keeper-dependent strategy, the kicker varies their shot according to the keeper’s actions, attempting to score in the opposite corner to the one where the keeper has dived. In the keeper-independent strategy, the kicker ignores the keeper, and makes a pre-planned shot. The keeper-dependent strategy is thought to be inferior, because unless the keeper dives early, there’s insufficient time to make the necessary adjustment, and they’re not actually looking at where they intend to shoot.

Yet Kuhn (2008), analysing penalties in top-level German football, found that 70% of all penalties used the keeper-dependent strategy. Why would 7 out of 10 professional footballers use completely the wrong strategy for something that is designed to determine the outcome of the match?

We’re back to stress and anxiety again. I like to think of the effect of anxiety in sport as turning you from a predator into prey. A lion hunting zebra will scan the herd looking for any weaker individuals. When the chase is on, the prey will be closely observed to pick out any deviations in course, and finally the focus will be on the target area for the attack. All the time, the eyes move ahead of the action, picking out relevant visual cues, relaying back visual information to enable the task to be successfully completed.

However, when you‘re prey, you constantly on the lookout for threats. When a threat is perceived, the body usually goes into a set of pre-programmed responses, such as “run” or “play dead”.
Coming back to sport, it means that instead of focusing on the parts of your vision that are required to be effective, the focus is drawn to perceived threats, such as the goalkeeper in a penalty shoot-out.

This change in visual behaviour under stress leads to the ironic effect that player’s intense desire not to miss leads to precisely the behaviour that most likely to cause them to miss – i.e. not looking at the target. This effect has been found in several sports such as basket free shots (Wilson, Vine & Wood 2009) and golf (Binsch et al 2006). When it comes to penalty taking, Bakker et al (2006) found that telling players “not to shoot within reach of the goalkeeper” made them significantly more likely to shoot within reach of the keeper than telling them to “aim as accurately as possible”.

I’ve really only scratched the surface of what’s required to take successful penalties, and I haven’t even started on the best strategies for saving them. Bearing in mind that 22% of the goals scored in the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, there’s no excuse for not preparing your side properly for them.

David Donner

Olympic Countdown - Badminton

This is one sport where I’ve applied for tickets, for two reasons: I used to play regularly, and it was also the subject of my practical work when I took a Sports Vision Diploma about ten years ago.

For that diploma, I looked at the Sussex Under-13 badminton squad, of which my son was a member at the time. I conducted a series of visual tests and compared the results with the coaches’ estimation of the players’ abilities.

For nearly every test there was no correlation between vision and ability. There was one test, however, in which you have to read out some numbers that are close to you, and some that are further away, alternating from one to the other.

Actually, this test showed no correlation with ability either. But it occurred to me that this was a test of speed of vocalisation as well as vision. So I got the kids to read out the numbers from a page, and subtracted this time from the time it took to do the other test. And when I did that, I got a statistically significant correlation with the coaches’ player ratings.

The test is supposed to show the ability to focus clearly on different objects when moving the eyes between them. But it’s actually possible to do the test without moving your eyes, by taking in central and more peripheral information at the same time. Such a skill is clearly important in badminton, where you need to concentrate on the shuttle but be aware of your opponent’s position as well. And indeed this is a required skill in many sports.

One evening when I was playing, a coach was feeding shuttles to a young player, who was returning them with drop shots to the coach who stayed in the same position just the other side of the net. The problem with this is that it’s a form of “blocked” training, which doesn’t take into account the tactical side of the game that’s required in a match. Players can look good in training, but regularly under-perform on match day, or can’t progress their game beyond a certain level.

It would have been much better if the coach, having fed the shuttle from one position, moved to a different place to which the return had to be made. Or he could even have instructed the player to return the shuttle to where he wasn’t, which would have been even more realistic.
I guess the young man won’t be representing the UK next year.

David Donner

Olympic Countdown - Archery

There are 26 different sports being played at the 2012 Olympics. Some clearly have a greater link with sports vision than others, but few would have a greater reliance on vision than archery. Or so you would think.

When aiming in archery, it’s better to keep both eyes open as this helps balance. It’s harder to balance on one leg, for instance, if you’ve got one eye closed rather than both open. However, this does present a problem: something must be double.

If you point your finger at a distant object and concentrate on that object, you’ll see two fingers, the one on the left being the one that’s aligned with the right eye. And if you focus on your finger, you’ll see two objects, and this time it’s the one on the right that’s aligned with the right eye.

The other problem is that if you focus on your finger, the object will be slightly out of focus, and vice versa. In archery, the “finger” is a sight on the front of the bow. It seems to promote accuracy by focusing on the target, and having a slightly out of focus bow sight. You also need to make sure that it’s the left hand sight that you’re aligning, assuming that you’re using the bow right-handed.

I said that you’d think that excellent vision would be essential for any level of archery, but in fact some partially sighted or even blind archers can be remarkably accurate. How do they achieve this?

Well, they have two aids. One is a foot locator, which is a wooden frame, and against which they place their feet. It is built to the archer’s stance, which ensures that their feet are in exactly the same position each time. The other is a tactile sight, which consists of a fully-adjustable spring-loaded bar which touches some part of the archer’s hand when the bow is fully drawn. They also have a “spotter” who tells the archer the result of the shot, and helps with adjustments of the tactile sight.

This makes me wonder how care fully sighted archers take to ensure that their body position is exactly the same each time. At an elite level, a side-on video camera could relay picture onto a screen, then you simply subtract one image from the previous one to see if there’s been any change in position. I bet it would be a pretty good guide to the accuracy of the shooting.

Visually impaired archery is not currently an Olympic sport, but it is hoped that it will be by the 2016 Games.

David Donner

Training To Win!

A coach was recently telling me how his Colts side prepared for a big match. Both sides were unbeaten all season, but the other team were quite strong favourites.

A couple of days before the match his colleagues advised him that some light training would be best, but he insisted on a full contact session. His team went on to win the match 10 -9. The opposition had a long period of play just a few metres from the line, but time and time again the tackles were made to prevent them crossing for a try.

Obviously a balance needs to be struck. You need to give the players a chance to recover from a previous match, and you don’t want them exhausted because they’ve over-trained. But as a general principle, practice should be in some respects at least as difficult, if not harder, than playing a match.

So if you’re wondering why England failed to win the Grand Slam in Dublin, and were completely outplayed and outfought by Ireland, then maybe you need to know just one thing: England had only light training all week.

David Donner

Rugby Passing 2

Of course backs are also perfectly capable of dropping the ball. One of the most common causes is simply taking their eyes of the ball, being distracted by the opponent advancing towards them, or looking at the inviting try line ahead, for instance. This is particularly likely to happen if your passing drills are unopposed.
It could be that the weather is particularly bad on the day of the match and the ball is slippery. But why not practice this by making the ball deliberately wet or greasy? As well as preparing the players for quite a likely eventuality, it would also make them watch the ball into the hands more carefully.
There is another category of errors which comes from when the ball shouldn’t have been passed at all, because there was no one in position to take it. One of the things that set the top players apart is their decision making. They take the opportunities that come their way, but they don’t make rash decisions if the opportunity isn’t there.
A simple variation to touch rugby could introduce the concept of decision making from a young age. The attacking side forfeit the ball if they’re touched in possession of knock on as usual. But they would also have another option. If a player shouts “tackle” before they’re touched, they must stand still, but are allowed to pass the ball when a team-mate becomes available. The coach would decide how many times this “tackle” option would be allowed before the usual rules are back in play.
The key to making good decisions is using ones vision to analyse the situation as much in advance as possible. The players should therefore be told that they should expect that the ball is always going to come to them, and to think about what they’re going to do before the pass to them is made. But they also need to keep monitoring the position of their own and opposition players so they can change their mind at the last moment if necessary.

David Donner

Passing In Rugby

The standard of passing in the Six Nations so far this season has been rather variable, from excellent to the frankly ridiculous. Sometimes the guy with the ball is so desperate to keep the ball alive, either to stop it going out of play and conceding a line out, or because having beaten two or three people he’s got carried away, that a totally inappropriate pass is given, which the receiver has no chance of catching, and may even be picked off by the opposition.
Sometimes, however, a perfectly acceptable pass is made, and then dropped. If it’s a forward who’s dropped the ball, there tends to be a collective “If only that had gone to a back” reaction. But how much time is spent on improving the handling skills of forwards?
The process of catching the ball starts long before the hands try to make contact with the ball. The fly half could probably recognise the type of pass (e.g. spin, pop pass or loop pass) from the scrum half well before the ball is actually released. But a forward is less likely to be less able to do this.
So one could start by getting the scrum half to demonstrate some different passes to the forwards who would be told to watch how the scrum half shapes to pass the ball, to watch the ball into the hands, and to pay particular attention to the feel of the ball in the hands when it’s caught. This is then repeated while taking the ball on the run. Some deliberately poor passes – too high or low – can be added as passes won’t always be perfect in a match.
The final stage would be to convert this drill into a more realistic match practice. For instance, three forwards have to score a try past two defenders. The move begins when the scrum half makes one of the previously demonstrated passes to one of the forwards of his choice as they’re running forward. The three then have to use passing and movement to ensure their numerical supremacy counts.

David Donner