Very interesting stuff.
We can’t be the only GAA fans who have watched games in other sports and on seeing stats about the distances covered in games by certain players, wondered how GAA players fared in comparison.
Our questions have been answered in an extremely interesting graph put together by stats and performance analysis man Ray Boyne, who worked with the Dublin footballers until recently, has experience with a number of other sports teams in the past and who regularly posts very interesting performance-based data and information, mostly about the GAA, on his Twitter page.
Last night, Ray posted a graph comparing the distances covered in Mens and Ladies GAA relative to soccer, rugby, tennis, basketball and American Football and the results are very interesting indeed.
How far do they travel in a game ? pic.twitter.com/ce6cPNlYcb
— Ray Boyne (@AnalysisGAA) April 17, 2014
Ray worked out that male GAA players covered an average of 11.7km a game compared to soccer players (14.6km a game), ladies GAA players (9.6km), rugby players (7.2km), and participants in tennis (4.9km), basketball (4.4km) and American Football (2.0km).
While a number of mitigating factors have to be taken into account, for example, the time spent by a player on the pitch, the physical demands of the sport (e.g. amount of energy expended making tackles in rugby) and how exactly the distances are covered in each sport (number of sprints, length of sprints etc.), the figures still make for interesting reading.
Also, as a number of people responding to Ray after he posted in on Twitter last night pointed out, the distances of the top three are nearly identical when you break it down into metres covered per minute.
It’s great to see this type of scientific analysis applied to the GAA and the more of it we see in the future the better.
