The apex of the week for any rugby team is match day - the day where all of the training, meetings, and preparations come together in the search for victory. In the final part of this series, we learn about how Suntory Sungoliath use video analysis during live match scenarios.

Hudl Sportscode is central to all of the live analysis efforts during the match for Suntory Sungoliath.

“I use Sportscode to share feedback and the live feed with the coaches,” said Sudo. “I also try to finish coding everything for the team during the game.

“So, as an analyst on match day, I focus on coding,” said Sudo. “I use Sportscode to share feedback and the live feed with the coaches. Sportscode is great for me as an analyst as it allows me to set my criteria freely and definitely because the analysis is always backed by video images.”

Suntory Head Analyst Jun Sudo hard at work coding as many as 20 different events during the match on Hudl Sportscode.

Head analyst Jun Sudo will code a number of instances and feedback to the coach's box which allow Suntory’s coaching staff to analyze the game with data-backed insights during the match.

“I code set pieces, backs play and of course individual's skills for our players,” said Sudo. “I will also code ball possession metrics and the opponent’s performance metrics in the same way as ours, so we can see how they are playing and feed back those insights to our coaching team.”

The set piece is an area of analysis unique to rugby that Suntory use video analysis to break down and find insights towards.

Sudo spends the remaining available time during the match coding instances for post-match reporting, which is uploaded onto the Hudl.com platform so the players and coaches can view footage instantly after the game.

For Suntory’s head coach, it’s clear that video analysis is fully ingrained into the processes of professional rugby. 

“In regard to video analysis, we would spend maybe 80% of our day looking at video, whether it's our training, whether it's opposition analysis, or whether it's our games,” said Haig.” The ability to look in-depth at instances like running lines for players, tackle completion, ruck play, all sorts of things that we do as normal tasks during a rugby game. 

The analysis helps us pinpoint information that again we can then give to the players to improve their performance or an overall team performance, which is absolutely vital.”

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You can also check out our professional rugby case studies with Stade Rochelais and Leicester Tigers to learn more about their high-performance analysis workflows.