Why the best opponent analysis is the shortest one

Less scouting, filtered harder, gets more of it onto the pitch on match day.

Two players sit in front of a laptop. They're your centre backs, and for the last five minutes the screen has been showing how the opponent's strikers like to attack. Then it moves on to the opponent's corners, then their penalty strokes, which only matter to your goalkeeper. By the end of the session, each player in the room has heard maybe ten minutes that was really meant for them. Robert Noall put that picture on one of his slides, and it's the team-session side of the story he started in his earlier masterclass on individual clips, The video never lies.

Robert coaches a senior women's team in the Dutch league and the regional under-14 squad. He openly admits he loves video and likes to show a lot of clips. Yet in this masterclass for The Hockey Site he made a point that cuts right against that instinct: "I don't want to understand the opponent to understand hockey better. I want to understand the opponent so I can beat them."

Or, as he put it later: nobody needs to know their favourite breakfast, or what time they drink their morning coffee. You need to know how to beat them.

This was the in-depth follow-up to his session How to do a basic analysis from your opponent from video, so it assumes you're already analysing matches regularly.

This sounds obvious. It isn't how most opponent analysis gets done.

The usual routine goes like this. A coach downloads the match, codes everything they can see, builds a presentation, and only then asks what the team should do about it all. The analysis comes first and the purpose comes last.

Robert flips that order. His starting question is: what do we want to know about this opponent before the match starts? For his own senior team the list is short. How they build up. Their key players, and possibly their weaker ones. How they press and what triggers it. Penalty corners for and against. Anything strange or unexpected, like long corners or penalty strokes. That's it.

Everything else may be true and interesting. It doesn't make the cut.

Asked what coaches starting out tend to miss, his answer was the same idea in a sharper form: don't try to understand the opponent's whole tactical plan, go straight to how you can hurt them. Where are they weak? Where are the opportunities? Where are the threats?

The reason is time and attention. Analyse everything and, in his words, "you might spend 4 hours video analysis for a game that's only going to last an hour and a half." If the session you end up delivering is five minutes on three topics, most of that work was wasted. And players only have so much capacity. Fill it with opponent detail and there's less room left for your own tactics.

Once you have your list, Robert runs every observation through three filters.

Is it reliable? Video is subjective. Ten clips can make a team look like it builds with four at the back, when what they're actually trying to do is play with three and not quite managing it. So one match gives you an assumption, not a pattern. In his league, where teams share footage every week, Robert might have seven previous matches of an opponent. If six of those show the same build-up, he's comfortable telling the players. And he picks his words to match the evidence: "extremely likely" when it happens almost every time, "slight preference" when it's closer to a 60-40 split. Overstating has a cost. If players anticipate something that never comes, you've created a problem, not solved one.

Two practical tips for spotting real patterns in open play. Turn the volume up, because sometimes you can simply hear the opposition coach shouting from the sideline. And watch closely in the first seconds after a restart, before the game pulls the structure apart. What a team is trying to do isn't always what it ends up doing, so put yourself in their shoes: "If you were their coach, what would you tell them?"

Is it relevant? Relevance is about frequency. Robert's example is a long corner where the opponent passed back, played a high ball into the circle and won a penalty corner. "Did they do it once? Did they do it 7 times?" One clever routine the opponent used once isn't worth five minutes of your video session.

Is it actionable? Can your players actually do something with it? If the opponent likes to play a high ball into the circle from long corners, that's actionable: tighter man-to-man marking in the circle, or a goalkeeper ready to claim the ball. Knowing what the opponent does when they take their keeper off isn't actionable if they never take their keeper off.

Then there's a fourth layer: priority. Something can pass all three tests and still not deserve screen time. Robert's example is how an opponent plays when they get a yellow card. Reliable, relevant, actionable, fine. But is it more important than their build-up, their press and their corners? Probably not. It might be something you hold as a coach and shout from the bench, or pass to your assistant or captain if it happens.