How to do a basic analysis from your opponent from video

Most coaches have footage these days. A GoPro on a pole, a camera bolted to the clubhouse roof, a parent filming from the stand with a phone. What most coaches do not have is analysis software, an analyst, or three spare evenings to watch the same match twice. So the file sits on a hard drive and nothing much happens with it.

In a recent session on The Hockey Site, Robert Noall took that exact situation as his starting point: you have the video, you have no software, and you play the same opponent again in a week. What can you realistically get out of it? His answer is deliberately unglamorous, and that is what makes it useful. A notebook, a whiteboard, the playback speed doubled, the sound off, and five things to look for.

What follows is the shape of that approach: the five situations worth your time, the difference between a pattern and a coincidence, how to read a press from grainy footage, the one tactical lens that turns observation into a plan, and how little of it you should actually pass on to your players.

The temptation with a full match is to watch all of it. Noall does the opposite. He skips forward until one of five situations appears: how the opponent builds up, how they press, their attacking corner, their defensive corner, and a category he calls specials. Specials is the catch-all for anything that does not fit, and it is where the small gold nuggets live. In the match he used as an example, one player took two penalty flicks and put both in the same corner of the goal, stick side high. That is not a rule for your goalkeeper, but it is something worth knowing.

Everything else, the individual duels, the nice goals, the moments that annoyed you on the day, can wait. Five situations across a match gives you a picture. Twenty press clips and twenty build-up clips, if you have the patience, gives you a strong one.

And the work does not need software. If you have a tagging tool, you click a button when the situation starts and again when it ends. If you do not, you pause the video and draw what you see on a whiteboard or in a notebook. Noall's trick here is worth stealing: draw each build-up structure on the same whiteboard without wiping it. After five or six drawings you have something close to a heat map in marker pen, and the shape the opponent keeps returning to becomes obvious in a way that no single clip ever shows you.

The biggest risk in opponent analysis is not missing something. It is believing something too strongly. Noall is blunt about it: "if it happens once or twice, then it could be a coincidence. But if it's over a few games against different opponents, then it's more of a pattern, and we're trying to find those patterns."

An opponent can change their tactics from one week to the next. You can watch five videos of a team building with four at the back, walk into the match, and find them building with three. So the analysis is not "they are going to play like this". It is "they have repeatedly done this, and here is how we would beat it if they do".

There is a second discipline hiding in there. Watch a clip, form a hypothesis, then go looking for evidence against it. In the session Noall spots what looks like man marking in the midfield, then keeps checking clip after clip to see whether the same midfielder tracks a runner across the pitch. When he then looks at the same team a season later, they are marking zonally, because they had been isolated too often and changed it. The hypothesis was right about the match it came from, and wrong about the team in general. That is exactly why you test it.

There is also more footage available than most coaches use. Video of your opponent playing somebody else tells you things your own matches never will. In one clip the same team presses with a higher midfielder simply because the opposition built with four at the back instead of three. Their shape was a response, not a fixed identity.

Junior hockey in the Netherlands leans heavily on zonal defending, and Noall makes a point that travels well beyond that: not every zonal press is identifiable as one. Teams with less experience often start in the zone and slide into man marking because man marking is easier to understand under pressure.

So how do you tell from a wobbly wide shot? He watches one thing: what happens when an attacker runs across the pitch. If the midfielder goes with her at full speed, it is man marking. If she stays on the inside and lets the runner go while holding her space, it is zonal. Everything else, the numbers at the back, the block of four at the front, the width of the forwards, is context. The tracking run is the tell.

That single question is answerable on almost any footage, even when you cannot read numbers, even when a player on the sideline is out of frame. It is a good example of how far you can get with a poor camera and a clear question.

All of this would stay descriptive without an organising idea, and Noall's is isolation. "I think breaking a press is all about where can you find your advantage against the opponent, how can you find your +1 or your +2."

The mechanics are simple to say and hard to execute. If the opponent presses with two forwards against your three builders, you want those two forwards bound to the inside for as long as possible, because two players cannot cover the full width. Pass into the inside, make them commit, and the transfer to the outside arrives while they are still travelling. As he puts it, "distance is time when you're building up". The 2v1 on the sideline is not created by the pass. It is created by where their forward was standing two seconds earlier.

The same lens works in reverse when you watch their build-up. In the clips the white team repeatedly wins the ball because the red left back has been isolated on the sideline, and the fix is not a new drill, it is a starting position. Noall would tell the presser to start wider so that the opponent's outlet has to come inside, into the congested area. Against a back four he would close the transfer and force the ball through the middle, precisely because the footage shows this team struggling when they cannot go around the outside. "A lot of teams will say tackle on the outside, but if you force the team to do something they don't want to do, then that's what we should do."

Which raises a useful question for your own team. When you press, are you forcing the opponent into the area they least want to play in, or into the area you are most comfortable defending? Those are not always the same place.

Corners are where basic analysis pays off fastest, because the roles are so repeatable. Across a handful of clips Noall identifies a drag flicker, a hitter, and a preferred stopper. The pattern then does the work. When the drag flicker is not on the pitch, expect the hit. When the usual stopper is missing, expect something different. He also scans the injector and the top of the circle before the ball moves, and looks for runners coming in with sticks low, the tell for a deflection routine.

None of this is certainty, and he says so: "it's good to make informed decisions about where your focus is". You are still gambling. You are just gambling with better odds than the coach who noticed nothing.

The final point is the one most coaches get wrong. Having done the work, the instinct is to show all of it. Noall warns against exactly that. Show a team twenty clips and they start hunting for micro differences between structures that are functionally identical, and they arrive at the first whistle trying to analyse instead of play.

What the players get is a short version. This is the shape they keep using. This is where we think the space is. This is the player we want isolated, and this is how we plan to isolate her. Plus the honest disclaimer: "you should definitely tell your players that not everything the opponent does one day is going to be the same." A cheat sheet to help them anticipate, not a script to follow.

So, to bring it back round. You do not need software to get value out of opponent video. You need five situations, a whiteboard, the discipline to separate patterns from coincidences, one clear question to identify man or zone marking, and the isolation lens to turn what you saw into something your team can do. Then you give them a fraction of it, and let them play.

For coaches who want to go further, Robert Noall has covered the individual side of this in a separate session on video analysis of your own players (The video never lies), Sebastien Roland has looked at building an analysis workflow that a club can actually sustain (Get the most from video analysis), and Emily Calderon has spoken about doing this with youth teams (Video analysis for youth coaches). On the tactical side, the isolation principle above sits close to Noall's earlier work on outletting against man to man marking (How to train outletting vs man to man marking) and against zone marking (Outletting vs zone marking).