Application of a continuous pressure metric for Australian football

Abstract

Pressure is an important constraint on sports performance and is typically measured through manual notational analysis. A continuous representation of pressure, along with semi-automated measurement, would serve to improve the efficiency of practice design and analysis, as well as provide additional context to player competition performance. Using spatiotemporal data collected from wearable tracking devices, the present study applied Kernel Density Estimation to estimate the density of players, relative to the ball carrier, at point of skill execution during elite Australian Football training. Two environmental constraints were measured (area per player and number of players) to determine the relationship between these training design manipulations and density. Density was also compared with existing notational analysis measurements of pressure. Results indicated that a higher density on skills was associated with successful skill executions. The opposite relationship was found between notational analysis pressure measurement and skill effectiveness. A strong inverse relationship was found between environmental constraint manipulation and density, whereby increasing field size and playing number decreased the density on skill involvements. The findings offer insight into the continuous measurement of pressure and encourage practitioners to utilize training design manipulations to influence density as a constraint on skills.

The Effect of the COVID-19 Lockdown on the Position-Specific Match Running Performance of Professional Football Players; Preliminary Observational Study

“…These devices have already been investigated for metrics and were found to be appropriately reliable and valid in sports settings (i.e., less than 1% measurement error, and 80% of common variance with running speed measured by timing gates) [9,24,25]. This tracking system was already used in many other studies [26,27].…”

Relative Training Load and Match Outcome: Are Professional Soccer Players Actually Undertrained during the In-Season?

“…Data on the RP of the players were collected by 21 GPS devices (Vector S7, Catapult, Catapult Sports Ltd., Melbourne) with a sampling frequency of 10 Hz. The use of this tracking system has appeared in previous researches [25,26]. Such device was already investigated for metrics, and was found to be appropriately reliable and valid in sport settings (i.e., less than 1% measurement error, and 80% of common variance with running speed measured by timing gates) [19,27,28].…”

Comparison of physical demands between matches and small-sided games in Australian Football

“…Additionally, the comparisons were limited to three GPS metrics (distance, high-speed running and accelerations), however, this could be expanded further to include other GPS metrics such as deceleration efforts, as well as spatiotemporal data such as congestion and density. 34 A total of 34 files were removed due to loss of data capture or an injury sustained by a player. Although this is a strength of the data cleaning process, which ensures intensity distributions are captured from entire games and thus allowing for the effect of accumulated fatigue, it is possible that potentially important information could have been removed from the final analysis.…”