How Live Analysis Changed Life at Kirkby | OneFootball

Walk past a modern training pitch and you will spot nearly as many screens as cones. The days when a session meant a whistle, a few bibs and a manager shouting himself hoarse are long gone.

At Liverpool, the backroom staff have spent the best part of a decade turning the training ground into something closer to a laboratory and a fair bit of it now happens live, whilst the players are still out on the grass.

The Bill Shankly days of a steak pie and the eyes of Ronnie Moran are no more, thanks to the emergence of data as a key factor in what the Reds do.

From CERN to the Kop

The obvious place to start is the data department, because Liverpool were early movers on that front. That owes a lot to the owners, Fenway Sports Group, who arrived from baseball with a settled belief that numbers win you things. Ian Graham, a Cambridge physics PhD, ran the club’s research division for years and his modelling helped make the case for signing Mohamed Salah, Roberto Firmino and others. His successor, William Spearman, turned up at Anfield in 2018 having worked at CERN, of all places, and built the ‘pitch control’ models.

They show exactly where space is opening up across the pitch during a match. Rocket science, more or less, pointed at a corner routine. The clever part is how all of this feeds into an actual session. When Jürgen Klopp phoned Thomas Grønnemark in 2018 and asked a specialist throw-in coach to come and help, a fair few people had a good snigger about it. They stopped soon enough. By Grønnemark’s own figures, Liverpool went from 18th in the division for keeping the ball after a throw-in to top of the pile inside a year.

That is the kind of gain you only unearth by filming a drill, watching it back there and then, and adjusting it before the players lose the thread of what you are asking. Which is where the gear on the touchline earns its keep. Reviewing a clip used to mean trudging back indoors to the analysis suite.

Now a coach wants the footage right next to him on the grass and a single laptop screen is a bit cramped once two or three of you are hunched over it between drills. A portable second screen like the Duex Max DS, which clips straight onto a laptop lid, is exactly what is needed.

It isn’t glamorous kit, but it doesn’t need to be when it can help make on-the-spot analysis workable when you are stood out in the cold at the AXA Training Centre in Kirkby. None of it replaces coaching, of course. Virgil van Dijk still has to defend and Alexander Isak still has to finish his chances. But the margins in this game are painfully thin and Liverpool worked out earlier than most that a screen on the touchline might just be worth a point or two come May. The hope is that Andoni Iraola can see what he needs to see and impact training accordingly.