Latest / Second Nature / E192 Sam Larner: Why Talent Alone Doesn't Build a Winning Team

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E192 Sam Larner: Why Talent Alone Doesn't Build a Winning Team · Second Nature

• 0:07
  SPEAKER_01: How do you feel about your book?
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: In terms of like you like it.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I do like it.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: I think um I think because it was the first one I ever did, and because I didn't think I was gonna do it, it is you know, it was in like I didn't come from a background where it was normal to like a book.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: So I put huge amount into it, and then when it came out, I was like, I I I never went for that period of going, oh god, I've read this so many times, I hate it.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: I just always thought it's actually quite good.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_01: I started listening because I didn't do the audiobook, but I started listening to the audiobook just to do it.
• 0:37
  SPEAKER_01: Is that weird?
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um he does a great job.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember who is now, but he does a great job.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: But so I was listening to it and I thought it's quite good.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I was like, I don't know if that's um self-indulgent to think that, but um I do like it, yeah.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's um I keep, you know, I've just got the French version now.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: So like I don't speak French, but I'm kind of going through and thinking how cooler way to learn French by listening to your own book.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: That'd be amazing.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: You you say um talk to me about your because I don't know anything about your background.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Give me the backstory in terms of Yeah, so I uh I grew up in uh Yorkshire in Hebden Bridge, which is where we live now.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I did my PhD fieldwork on the river wharf.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh really?
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: Literally parking up in Hebden Bridge and throwing tiny little GPSs into the river, yeah, following them downstream, pulling them out, and then I wrote computer code to model the ones and zeros that came back.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Oh wow.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, small world, right?
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Godfall.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: We'll see.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: When would when would that be?
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_00: 2003 to s to eight.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Oh god, yeah.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, how would you being yeah, how would you be at school then?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Don't do that, that's not fair.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: We've only just met, they're already calling me old.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: Fucking hell.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just implying.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just you're gonna make Penny's Day on this episode.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um I was playing the boys a kid.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: My dad's Welsh, my mum grew up in Wales, so it was a big part of like childhood.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I was pretty bad, and then went to university and then just was like what did your parents do workwise?
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so my dad works well, both retired, but worked uh at a council.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so he was in charge of lead generation in Bradford and then in uh the Peach District.
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and my mum was a teacher.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, so we you know played a lot of rugby, went to university in London, um loved it, kind of, and then thought I'm gonna take rugby back up, but I'm just gonna take it.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I did linguistics, okay, um, which I've not not used since I love doing it.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Why linguistics are not like English or journalism or something in that regard?
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: I think uh well to be honest, the big reason is I read a book um called I think it's called Language.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great book, but um uh it was just fantastic.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was like every page was an interesting thing about language.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um I probably would have done English, I I wasn't like I read a lot as a kid, and then I think a lot of people go through this.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you get 16 and you just not cool anymore.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um fiction and sort of literally everything, yeah.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_01: So I I read loads of fiction as a kid, I'd read loads of non-fiction.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: I I would probably have read maybe at 16, uh maybe a little bit later, we've read Money Ball.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I was quite into baseball.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: We'd been to the US as a family, um, and this was before smartphone, well, before I had a smartphone, I guess they were just coming in.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_01: But um me and my dad would pick up USA Today, I think it is, like the free newspaper, and we'd look through the baseball results, and we didn't know anything about baseball, so we were trying to work out what like you know what it all meant, what a H was and what an R was and all this kind of stuff.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so each day we try and work it out, and then at the end of the trip, we went to go and watch the New York Mets, and we were just happening to be sat behind two kind of proper local New Yorkers who were basically just doing their own version of a podcast where they were just chatting to each other and go, Oh, this guy he plays here, then I expect him to do this, and we were just kind of captivating, just sat there and just letting them let it wash over us.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: But that idea of of the stats and day to the sport was I guess that seed was plenty.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't I didn't really know that was something I was interested in, but I think just that idea was kind of dropped in.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then I came back, the money ball, and I thought I'm gonna do this for Ludby.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then started playing Lugby at university again, but as an adult and loved it and got a lot better, and then got injured in what I thought was kind of gonna be kind of that's the end of my career.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: And I still wanted to be involved because I was only I think I was only 20 or 21 when that happened.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: Bad injury?
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: I smashed out a tooth um and um when I went to get it so basically they they like they left it in for a year dying, and it it I didn't realise this, but all your bone in your jaw starts dying if there's because there's no blood going to that um uh tough.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: So at that point it was like, well, we'll give you the placement, but I wouldn't do anything contact with it.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I was like, okay, well that's that's probably that thing.
• 5:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I started coaching and I went to Blackheath, who at that point within National One, they've just got promotion to the championship in the second division.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I say, Oh, I'm uh I'm an analyst.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: I can do can we do some analysis for you?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I wasn't, I had no real idea what I was doing, but I just felt like I I read some books about it.
• 5:31
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of dabbled in like um I think I think I basically done what's equivalent to blogging now, although I don't even know if I put it put them out, but I just done some ideas on like uh I remember the one that I did was Danny Cyprian at that point, yeah, was like the big English hero, but there was a question of whether his defence was kind of flaky.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I did this analysis where I looked at him versus everyone he played against and who had the higher tackle success rate.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you know, in hindsight it wasn't particularly rigorous, but I really enjoyed doing it, and it basically came out that he's absolutely not flaky defensively, and he's probably in the upper quarter of um fly halves by tackling.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I actually met him a few years ago and we talked about that.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: He's very nice guy and big into his analysis, which perhaps you wouldn't maybe expect from his kind of image.
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but uh that was the start of it.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so I went to them and they were like, yeah, fine, come on board, we'll we'll kind of give you some uh give you kind of expenses and we'll give you the footage and kind of do what you want.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought, oh gosh, okay, I'd better do this now.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I started off trying to just pick out some of the easy stuff.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I thought, well, the the most obvious thing to do is just some bits where the ball isn't moving, so like line outs, um, scrums and just attacks off.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_00: So in terms of the tape they're giving you at this point, just normal game footage.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, nothing uh kind of complicated about it, and also a lot of the time filmed by I think at that point, will it be Green?
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_01: What's that university that's that way?
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: Is it Greensmiths?
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_01: No, something Smiths calls I can't remember.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, there was Goldsmiths, that's the one.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_00: But there's a universe single camera footage from a tower or something.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, but from a kid who wants to be a a director, yeah, a film director.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: So he's he's kind of filming, doesn't know anything about the being, he's just kind of filming the game.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: So you get sometimes a game which was filmed close up, which is basically useless for analysis.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, sometimes it would be, you know, they'd lose interest after the hour mark and it would kind of vaguely follow action.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, some of them were great, some of them would be filmed, you know, at that level, there weren't stands, so a lot of the time they would be filmed basic grassroots, you know, at that level, so you could see half the picture bring out the other half.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you're just looking through those and going, well, what can I find about this?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that was great because there were some things I remember speaking to them halfway through this game, because I was I was there and I was noting down the line outs.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_01: I said, Oh, look, when they do this, this is what's gonna happen.
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_01: So if this happens, you flow here.
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the head coach took it and went, okay, we'll use that.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then the second half, which was great, I could tell that they used it.
• 8:17
  SPEAKER_01: The problem is to such an extent that it was obvious now where the opportunity was for the opposition, so they could just quickly pivot and just do something different.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So I was kind of sat there watching it as they did exactly what I said they should do, and the opposition just went, Oh, well, if you're gonna do that, we'll just do this then.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was that good education of like what I think the limit of what stats can tell you, which I think is is useful to know, um, but also the areas where you can make a difference.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because I think, and maybe this is true to a lot of people who may be listening who think I just don't want stats in sport, I just I want the romance of it, I want the just pure enjoyment.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_01: What I would say is there's a limit to what stats can do, like a real limit to what they can do.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they're not at the level where we can just plug them into an algorithm and go, TA's gonna wing, there's no point in us all turning up.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: There's so much nuance, so much difficulty that goes on there.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what you're just trying to do is just find a couple of percent.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think once you accept that, it becomes really enjoyable because you're thinking, well, where is that margin?
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: Where's that little tiny edge I can get?
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you're not you don't feel like you have to solve the whole thing, you're just trying to solve a little part of it.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so yeah, so I went from there, then started writing.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I went to uh Planet Rubby, um, and then I went, I gave some stuff for the world after that.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and just kind of all did you approach them in terms of I want to give you a data angle to this and a data story?
• 9:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um so I think I'm just trying to think I think I got quite lucky in that I started a job with a guy whose mate at that point was running the Rugby blog, um, which was actually it's kind of like a the Barcelona academy of people a lot of people have gone there who've then gone into really good stuff.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh so I just thought I want to do some analysis.
• 10:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um started off there, then went to Planet Rubby again doing the similar stuff.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: And did did actual mathematical stats come into your repertoire at that point?
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: Are you reading in terms of that side of stuff?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because language is your thing and rugby, yeah, but you're now pairing actual statistical analysis with that.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so there was a big chunk of that that was signed coming.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_01: I'd say it was it was pretty basic.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, like it I remember looking at a this should be probably in the first couple of years, trying to work out how good a hooker is at flowing out the lineup because you know, you see like 80% or 85%, and often because it's quite difficult to know who's to blame or who's to blame.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: How do you attribute the success to the lifter, the capture, the other team, the weather, everything?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly that.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_01: So what I was doing was I was looking at the different hookers for the team and I was comparing their success rates, and I was saying what a um weighted success rate is.
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_01: So if someone has 88% and then someone throwing to the same team has 81%, then their weight uh you know effectiveness is basically minus 7%.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Assuming it's not going to be exactly, but assuming everything else stays the same, as control as many availables as you can, then their margin is kind of that they're seven percent worse or seven points worse.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I started to do stuff like that.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then the I guess a big breakthrough was 2019 when I got invited to go to the uh Rugby World Cup by a guy called Simon Gleave.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he went to his first World Cup in this role in 2003, but he was basically responsible for when you listen to a commentator, they go, This is so and so.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, his dad played ice hockey for Canada.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, his team was responsible for all that information, and then they were responsible for during the matches feeding in um this is a quickest hat trick.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_00: And he is he an independent business?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_01: So he was part of um a company called Grace Note, who were part of now I can't I'm not sure I can remember actually what the larger business is called, but uh Nielsen.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so they're part of Nielsen.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um so they were basically responsible for when you go and guide on the or TV remote and it tells you information about the film.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: That was their primary business, but he had this offshooting sport, and it was like Olympics and um Commonwealth Games and major tournaments where they could tell you uh this gang aang sprinter, you know, something about their life and his Was it all marginal and kind of away from like professional soccer and NFL and things?
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it was away from those those kind of ones.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was more, yeah, more the Olympics and and the World Cup and stuff like that.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so he just made the case that there was value in this.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um and he brought me along to do something Alice's articles because up until then the whole business of literally just being that kind of feeding that information to commentators and giving them pre-match packs that they could use.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and what he wanted was you know one or two articles a day just looking at um teams and games and what went on.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_01: It was just fantastic.
• 13:17
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I was there for six weeks in Tokyo just writing articles all the time.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: Um what was your writing process around that?
• 13:23
  SPEAKER_00: So you as if you take me into watching a game, did you know what the article was going to be from the game or you had to find it in it?
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So some of them would be I think there's some of them which are obvious.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so beforehand, you'd be you know, you'd be looking at a game where there was a clear matchup between two players, for example.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Talk us through a real example.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_01: So I say, I'm trying to think from 2019.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um so I think uh there was the Japan Island, actually, Japan, South Africa.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_01: So in 2015, that'd been the biggest upsetting world be where Japan had beaten South Africa.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_01: 2019 they played a game in the quarterfinal, and so it was a comparison between well, what happened in 2015, how did South Africa stop that?
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_01: What did Japan tweak?
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_01: So you knew before the game that was gonna be the arsenal, and then after the game, it was gonna be well, who won based on what we looked at, who um who took the which of the two teams, knowing what they knew before the game, which of those two teams executed the best?
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_01: So in that situation, you've got a fairly fairly clear example of um this is what I think is gonna happen, and unless something dramatic happens, which is totally different, then that's what I'm gonna talk about afterwards.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: So, do you write some of that ahead of time?
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: So effectively, have you written the reflection piece and then you're looking for the new stuff?
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, which was certainly staying.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think in that case, you would be you'd be certainly looking at saying these are gonna be the core themes of the article.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, these articles were like 500 words, which was amazing because when I first got there, I remember thinking we we got given the the style guide, and I remember thinking it probably doesn't apply to me because I mean I'm not really interested in analysis stuff.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the first article was like a thousand words, and so I'm just going, no, just go away and just cut half of that.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it was great because you just can't waffle and you you have to just go for the for the core bits, but yeah, to the point in terms of that writing process.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: People think shorter's easier, it's really beneficial.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, what was what's the it's um Churchill quote, isn't it?
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry it's so long, I didn't have time to make it shorter.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah, exactly.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think it would be a great exercise to be honest for a lot of people.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_01: To be honest, this was what kind of Twitter was really good for back in the day, is that you only have a certain number of words and you want to make that point punchy.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so you write it out and it's a hundred, you know, minus hundred, you get that little notification, you think, okay, well, I'm gonna have to trip scrim out a hundred characters here.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that process of just going, that's not near you, that's not near you, that's not you.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: I'd quite like to put that in there, but I haven't got a space, so that's coming out.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: When you were watching games, are you are you making notes?
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: Are you are you actually live writing during a game?
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: How do you manage to balance the two things that are going on?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that was a challenge.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_01: So I would have um I'd have a laptop that was just naturally slightly slower than the uh you know, I'd be streaming that.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd be watching it on the TV, I'd have the laptop which would maybe be 15 seconds behind.
• 16:19
  SPEAKER_01: So I'd see something.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I think one of the things that I really enjoy about watching a game live on T whether on TV, whatever, is you're looking for the unusual.
• 16:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you're looking at and you're going, something odd has happened there, but I don't, I'm not quite sure what it is.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: And then you look and go, ah, okay, the thing that's different is just your own slow motion second feed almost.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Where did that come from as a skill?
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was just luck.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_01: I think I just had this second laptop open because I think initially I didn't know it was going to be on the TV.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because we were in the office space, I thought probably they're not going to put the games on TV.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then they did.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: And then about you already had the laptop set up.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought, oh, how easily could you have just closed that and missed a yeah?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, what a marginal gain there.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: And do you still follow that process to today?
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: You still have your dual.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: I will, yeah.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_01: So normally I don't have to produce stuff quite so on the on the whistle.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I will often go back and look at the uh video which is clipped up.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the jobs that uh analysis analysts even do is they will clip up the game into all its constituent parts.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_01: So like every single carry, every single scrum, you know, whatever they might be.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really easy afterwards to go, yeah, there was a carry at about 18 minutes, which something unusual about it.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: Find that carry.
• 17:38
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, that's that was what was unusual about it.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_00: Talk um talk us through how that's changed in terms of so from the first footage where it was patchy at best, to what what would you receive now in terms of a full package of uh an England New Zealand game?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you would get uh multiple camera angles, so you would get um a wide feed, um, which is similar to what you would normally see on the TV.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, you'd be interacting with this through an online platform now rather than it arriving.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: So you go into a setup where you almost I imagine, like you know, pennies behind the camera now with an editing desk.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: You've almost got that sort of setup where you can dive into exactly that.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I work with a company called Oval, um, and they provide the this kind of data.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_01: So um for the big match like that, you would get a wide feed.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: So you know, when you're watching a kickoff, say, and you can see more or less everyone on the pitch um from high up in one of the standings, you get that, and it would just always be what was showing on that camera.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: You then get a tight feed, so you get basically just the player who is involved in the action, maybe a couple of others around them.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you get the engong feed, um, so behind one of the posts, and then you get the um broadcast feed, so what is showing where they clip between the two or they they change between the one commentary feed?
• 18:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can do, yeah.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: So so sometimes the the TV will include the commentators, sometimes it won't, so sometimes there won't be any commentary on it.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but you you'd have at least those, you might sometimes have more.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So um I remember, you know, that you will sometimes see if you go to uh some grounds and certainly training grounds, like a CCTV camera basically up on one end, and that's just their they're filming the training sessions.
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so that's really useful because it gives you a you know, if I go to watch a game, I would like to be high on one end, um, because you can see the space, which is essentially the most crucial part of uh rugby booked promotes any game, any kind of game like that.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um so you get all that information, but then in addition to that, you'd be able to click through um everything that happened in that game with layers and layers and layers of nuance.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, you could look at every single time that someone's made a run with a ball, so a carry we would call that in rugby.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_01: But then you could go, I want to see all dominant calories.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So you could see all carries where when the player hit contact, hit the tackle, they went forward.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or all neutral carries where basically they hit each other and went down, and all um negative carries where they hit each other and went and the carry went backwards.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: But then you could go by a particular player, by a particular part of the pitch, um, even in a particular game state.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: So you could look at all carries that happened when there was a player simbing.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you could look at passes, you could look at left-hand passes, light-hand passes, long passes, short passes, offloads, um, good passes, bad passes, misplaced, all this kind of stuff.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a huge amount of data that comes in because every action is not just what happened, there's a qualitative assessment on it, and then there's a location, and then there's a person.
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: So how fast after a game is that available now?
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of it is is done live.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so a lot of the time, if you're in a uh club environment at half time, you'll have a lot of that information.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_01: You won't be doing the whole thing because often you will be you'll have KPIs that you try and hit.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I spoke to a French team recently, and they would say, We want to kick uh every single time we receive the ball in our own half.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what you'd be doing is you go, you know, click, we've received the ball, um, click for the number of phases, so the number of carries we've had in our in our half, uh, click at the end of that possession.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you at half time you could say, look, we said we were going to 100% of the time, we were gonna kick as soon as we get the ball.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, it's 50% of the time or 60% of the time.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, or you might have you know a bunch of different KPIs, and so at half time you'd be looking back at those two, three, five KPIs, and you'd be saying, Yeah, this is where we're short, this is where we're succeeding.
• 21:42
  SPEAKER_01: Or alternatively, we thought they were going to approach the um match in this way, the opposition were gonna approach the match in this way, but they've not, so we're now gonna need to change and pivot to this second plan we pick that we had.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where there's the data collectors, so they outside.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Other teams, they would be doing it live.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: So in a lot of the games, you would get it a lot of them, you get it as it's happening.
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_01: So in fact, on TV, that's where you see like carries, meters, mage, all that kind of stuff.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um, they would then check it, which sometimes happens where the player might have 30 tackles, and then after the game, they might have 32 because they've realized that they will involve in two others.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: Is that still mainly human check now, or is that AI?
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: So there are AI uh options, but it's mostly still human.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that um I think there's still struggles with is the nuance of you know who specifically was involved in that action.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I've seen it, for example, where there's two players in a leg scrum cap and they it's not quite clear who's who.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so yeah, there's lots of nuance like that.
• 22:50
  SPEAKER_01: And the member, this has probably changed now, but I remember five, six years ago, chatting to someone who, you know, this was very early days of automated tracking technology.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and they were saying in football that you at the end of the start of the game, you click on everyone and you say, you know, this is Drew Bellingham, this is Halley Kane, whoever.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but as soon as the corner happened, they all went into the same spot, it would all become one, and then you'd have to come out and you go, Okay, that's Drew Bellingham, that's Halley Kane, that's you know.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I expect that's changed now.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_01: I expect that's where it's probably going.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_01: To be honest, the job of coding is quite tedious and very difficult.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so a lot of the best analysts out there, because the analysts in the game are increasingly becoming core parts of it.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: So I remember probably six or seven years ago, mate, maybe a bit less now, but Gavin Vaughn, who was who's now moved to Newcastle as a head of recruitment, but he was at Glasgow, um, and then he went to Scotland, so he kind of was a core part of Gregor Townshend's team.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but he was kind of moving into a coaching role, really, because he was an analyst, but his rugby brain is unbelievable.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: So um there was this the walls of who could coach were kind of breaking down because you were like, Well, he I don't think he played at particularly high high level, but he clearly knows what he's talking about, and so they were like, Yeah, fine, you go and coach this or you talk to these players about that, and that is increasingly becoming a factor.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um would an analyst be captured in the salary calculation?
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's that's a good question.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So they would not, um, I believe all of the non-playing staff uh excluded from that.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so yeah, you what point of opportunity for a a um you know, you you end up having to pay hundreds of thousands of pounds for a three percent improvement in your kicker, whereas you could find five percent in where you're kicking from.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, absolutely, yeah.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: So there's some of the the most fundamental changes in the way that game that the game has been played have come from analysts.
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so if you watch the game now compared to six years ago, um it's totally different, absolutely, totally different.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and that will have been that comes from analysts identifying value and butting their heads against the wall of often coaches who are kind of gut trusters, and you know, a lot of them this is changing, but certainly a few years ago, a lot of coaches would employ analysts because you kind of hack to.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: Um nowadays they're employing them and they're they're those analysts stay with that coach because they completely trust what's going on, and they completely trust what the analyst is is giving them.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: And the coach, not to say that the coach is kind of obsolete, they still and their gut should be trusted a lot of the time, but the analyst the margin that they're operating is when the coach thinks one thing and the reality is the other, and there's quite a lot of that happening in the game, and that's where the analyst can kind of really earn their biggest.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_01: We'll we'll totally get onto the psychological part of it because it's fascinating.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: Just before we leave the provision of data and information, um, that qual the the quality and quantity of info you describe at a big international game.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is that all international games or only the top-tier ones?
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_00: And how how does the data drop off as you drop through the levels?
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so you would get more or less exactly the same as I described there in the the premiership, the top 14, the URC.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: So these are the the kind of the the Premier Leagues of across Europe.
• 26:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but also those providers will provide that same data for really any league that they're um kind of contracted to.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_00: So Major League Rugby in the US, which is a much smaller league, but the league will pay Oval or the provider, yeah, and then other people license from the league or from Oval?
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so normally the league will I know this happened in the championship, uh, which is a second division in England, where they said, look, we'll get you this package if all the clubs agree to it.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um I'm not sure exactly how that worked in terms of financing.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I think the league probably said we'll cover the bill, but you have to then use it.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so usually it would might be with like a union where you go to the French Club Union and you say we'll provide the data for the top 14 for Pro D and maybe for the third division as well.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: And and an individual can access that data from the company directly?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the teams would get given subscriptions for that.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you would also get your betting companies, media companies, who would either pay to have essentially unfiltered access where you just get everything, or they would pay to receive things like um stat packs.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: A bespoke report that they want or something.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_00: Really interesting.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: And in terms you mentioned Oval, are there are there a lot of companies that do this or it's limited?
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I'd say a few years ago it was it was Optar, which probably m a lot of people know about from football and things like that.
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, their focus I've I suggested moved fully to football, so Oval is is really growing in the in the rugby space.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um there's a company called Framesports, which are I think they're Zimbabwean, but they're AI focused, but they're basically looking at um lower down the level, so not necessarily grass loops, but certainly kind of semi-f semi-professional.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: One thing we see nowadays is through Vio, which is like a uh a kind of a well, a camera basically, but it it tracks what's happening and it also codes um not to a super high level, but it will code, you know, tries, scrums, line outs, um kickoffs.
• 28:23
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's probably automating that capture process.
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly, yeah.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_00: I think the bit people the cost of delivering this at a high level is is gonna be significant because it's not one person doing the stats on this in the back end.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: There'll be uh and and every additional factor is a multiple again.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_00: So there's a huge amount of I don't know if they've pulled the date, but it's gonna be millions of data points from a game, isn't it?
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: So I think I think I worked out that I just picked a a game at Langham and I think there was something like 52,000 data points through you.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's not even 80 minutes because obviously not all of those 80 minutes feature uh actual rugby, so it's about 40 minutes of of game produces about 50,000 data points.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's interesting.
• 29:06
  SPEAKER_00: Have you done the stats on the average time of balls in play with stuff?
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's going up and up and up.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um it's sitting probably about 36 to 39 minutes.
• 29:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, so you get something like football where it might be about uh about an hour of the 90 minutes, maybe 65 minutes.
• 29:24
  SPEAKER_01: The B League is is about I think 68 minutes of the 80, so that's pretty high ball in play.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: American football might be about four minutes of ball in play across an hour, and of course it's three hour kind of uh extravagance, I guess, for for each game.
• 29:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, so you've got all that, and then as you say, the the costs are significant, um, which is why a lot of people kind of come into the space.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: But I think the problem is you have to be accurate and you have to collect a lot of information, and you also have to collect information which differentiates you from but in the next six years, the degree to which that'll be able to be automated, it's a bit like in a bizarre comparison, it's a bit like what Elon Musk is doing with rockets.
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to drive the cost of putting a kilo in space to zero.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the cost of data from sport will get pretty damn close to zero because you'll be able to automate more and more and more, yeah, and then it'll be the cameras, and then they'll find super cameras that are just embedded into all modern stadiums and do it automatically anyway, yeah, and we'll get just an overwhelming quality of stuff that comes through.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 30:26
  SPEAKER_00: The um in every, and I it's probably before we started rolling, but we talked about almost equivalent books to yours in a soccer context and a cricket context, and there's F1 versions where people have had that data realization moment.
• 30:39
  SPEAKER_00: In almost all of them, and in every spot, in every book about a dominant sports team, there's a chapter that always goes, and then we kind of professionalised, and the strength and conditioning coaches turned up, and we were the first people to get fit and strong and athletic, and we just dominated.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_00: You see it with like Clive Woodward's England in 03.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, he he came in, I think, in 1999, was it?
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and that was when it kind of started, but yeah, definitely came.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: The Australian cricket team in one day cricket, and they just have we seen that same thing in in rugby where you've got the the athletes arrive and you've seen that step change.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh Lugby became professional in '95, but it it only insofar as the players got paid.
• 31:21
  SPEAKER_01: It was still a very amateur-ish kind of setup.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: Um, the it's really interesting now where if you look at um you know National One, so the third division of Lugby, I'd be fairly confident that if you took any of those teams, they could beat the the kind of the elite teams of 95 because just more ball in play, a lot more bowling play now, even at that level, um, fitter, um, more skillful.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the the big shift from rugby came when so for anyone who who's not a Cav Rugby fan, you have eight forwards and seven backs.
• 31:55
  SPEAKER_01: The eight forwards are generally described as you know, the piano pushers, and then the backs are piano players.
• 32:01
  SPEAKER_01: So you want eight people who are just strong and can do the the hitting and the carrying where you're tight to the opposition, where you're not gonna go very far, but you need a you know a big lump to kind of get a couple of meters, you know, the scrums, the lineups, all that kind of stuff.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: And then the backs are meant to operate in the in the open spaces.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um the huge shift that would be had is that those eight forwards were became able to play.
• 32:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we see this with um Henley Pollock, who is uh asking for a million quid to play at the Saints, which obviously doesn't sound like a lot from a football perspective, but would make him probably the second highest paid player in the world.
• 32:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where he is a forward, so he should be those piano pushers, but he plays like a back, but he also plays like a forward.
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_01: So he's able to run those defences, he can link passes, but then when he needs to, he can push in the scrum, he can operate in the line out, he can make the big tackles.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_01: And they he's not the only one.
• 32:56
  SPEAKER_01: There's there's maybe three, 400 players now who who can operate in that twin role.
• 33:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and at that point, what happened was defenses who previously had really only had to mark seven players, the other eight, they just had to tackle them in a straight line.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_01: They suddenly had to mark 15 players who could, if you gave them any space, would be gone.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so defenses got better.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so the response from attacks was to therefore get better, get the offloads going, become more structured, uh, become more clinical, become quicker, become fitter, uh search for those opportunities.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so that push and pull and constant evolution has meant we've got the game that we have.
• 33:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if people remember kind of Sony Bill Williams in I guess the late 2000s, early 2010s.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he used to do these amazing offloads where they flick the ball out of the back of his hand as he was being tackled, um, and they would go viral every single time he does it.
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: You will see those basically any level of televisor being out, and no one talks about them because you just see them all the time.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: And that evolution is happening in you know 10 years, really.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so that has been exceptional in a way that I don't think we see in many other sports, and that's happened because of the professionalization.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because although we're talking about kind of ball skills, that only comes when you have a player who is first of all fit enough to get down the park, um, and second of all And fit enough to make a good decision, yes, it's actually going to get that neurological um decay in quality of decision making as your engine drops off and you get tired.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, yeah, exactly that.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's um uh great coach, Mike Frankigas, you before uh for the book.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he was at Rassing '92 with an Argentinian winger called Wang Imhoff.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: And Imov had this amazing ability to, you know, you imagine a winger, they play on the wing, but he would come in field, he would basically be running back and forth across the pitch looking for those weak spaces, and then when he found them, he he'd attack them.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: And it looks obvious.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like, well, why aren't we all?
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the problem is it's really hard work, and so not only can he get there, he can scan for where the space is, and then when he realizes there's a whole, he can further accelerate from how quick he's moving.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: So that all just comes from a base level of fitness that is hugely higher than it was.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we could do 10 hours on the two sentences you just did.
• 35:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so one crossover and an obvious love of mine has been you're describing almost the multifaceted nature of players there, players who could and do you remember when um Eddie Jones was mocked for saying the um exeter winger could have played seven.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that was the point he was making, right?
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: That the interoperability to take it from rugby to cricket, England won multiple uh white ball cricket world cups by stacking the team with all rounders, yeah, and it meant with the same skill set they could be a team that was predominantly batting heavy and bowling heavy, whereas everyone else had that cleaner partition of six and five or seven and four and things.
• 36:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we are seeing it in sport, and then you just go to Guadiola and like him wanting the goalkeeper to be as comfortable on the ball and it's how you can get other people into play.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: What's what's the next evolution of that you think's coming?
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think the the kind of the the point that all of this hits is, and this is literally the the almost the limit of analysis, is that if you've got a player and you you might imagine, okay, well, you can you can search for the weakness in the opposition and you can say, oh, when the weak when the opposition do this, you should do that.
• 36:36
  SPEAKER_01: And that on the face of it seems fairly simple, and this maybe even seems like the entire job of what an analyst should do.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is, in the heat of a of a game, even as fit as they are now, trying to spot that kind of nuance or that niche kind of thing that might be happening and exploiting it is is basically not possible.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so the limit of the of the analysis, you can build all the algorithms you want, you can do all the collect even more data, you can do everything you want, but at some point you have to pull it into the mind of the player, and and that's basically where you overload the system.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so what's gonna happen is or what we're seeing now is where analysts do a good job, is they can prepare the team during the week via the coaches for the pictures that they're gonna see on the weekend.
• 37:23
  SPEAKER_01: So you will see this a lot.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: I know actually this is a an issue that comes up, or this is an interesting crossover with cricket, where um, if you take um a good club level cricketer and you put them in a in a batting cage or batting net and you sang down kind of 90 mile an hour bowl off a machine, uh at first it will be terrifying, but if they stick in there, they will quickly become kind of as good as a very good player because they'll just see the ball, hit the ball.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but where the really good players come in is when there's the actual cricketer coming down, and they're when there's a bowl coming down and they can go, okay, I know he's gonna try and hit my leg stump here.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna prepare now, I'm gonna hit that ball, and I know he's gonna hit my off stump, so now I'm gonna go for it.
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, this looks like a short ball, I'm gonna play that.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas a good club cricketer has got absolutely no idea what's coming.
• 38:15
  SPEAKER_01: So the bowler comes down, the 90 mile an hour that he was just previously hitting with a little you know relative with ease, is now impossible to hit, and that's what coaches are trying to do.
• 38:26
  SPEAKER_01: They're trying to say, look, you're probably gonna face this, so that's lung through this 20-30 times, and here's what you're gonna see probably in the game.
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to give them a crib sheet for experience.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the really interesting thing about that cricket analogy, assuming you're not getting physically hit by the ball that often, you're not that limited to how many balls you can face in a net.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there isn't a huge amount of physical toll on the batsman in that maybe an elbow, maybe something.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas you are limited in rugby, so if you're carrying a ball into contact, uh and this is really acutely clear in American football.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_00: So you get um running backs in American football, they count the number of carries they've had in college because when they go to the NFL, if they've had more than like a thousand carries, they're like, these guys are done.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so um, I don't know if you've seen it, but the the Washington Commanders did a huge amount of stuff over the last two years of building almost like an F1 simulator for their quarterback, so they're playing like Madden, but in the most Apple Vision way.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever tried an Apple Vision on yeah?
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have, not for the I'd love to see it for this purposes, but yeah.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: Incredible.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: I went in last week for a demo on their sort of sports setup.
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, it was one driving an F1 car wow and it it's unbelievable.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Penny, you've you've got to do it.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_00: You sit with it and you can see in the mirrors and the stuff, it's um unbelievable.
• 39:44
  SPEAKER_00: But what that's allowing you to do is have those mental reps and see those pictures without the physical toll of doing it.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_00: So if we get to that level, all of a sudden you can give people the mental reps and 10 years of experience without 10 years of toll on the body.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's there's some of that to a fairly low tech degree in the so um you will see a lot of players if you go and visit a club, they will just be sat there watching you know the lying out and caller will just look through the lying out calls of the opposition and kind of go, okay, when that happens, that happens.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm expecting to see this.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so they will try.
• 40:23
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I I'd say it certainly is in some areas.
• 40:28
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, I think probably the main ones that used to be there are probably gone.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but you will see every elite level fly half and scrum half watching a hell of a lot of tape.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, a lot of them will be.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I would say there's areas for that to get better.
• 40:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um partly, so you'll see some who are just even someone like Thing Musle, who is kind of mercurial, and you would think he probably just turns up, just blings his boots and just turns up on the day.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_01: But he's doing a lot of that kind of analysis and going, okay, well, in when I see this in the defense, that's where they think the gap's gonna be.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and a lot of it is just as you say, just preloading that clip sheet so that on the Saturday you're making that decision without thinking about it.
• 41:17
  SPEAKER_01: But there's not a huge amount of VR being used, I think increasing amounts, but like up until recently it's been garbage.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I remember trying it because it this I saw it three or four years ago, and we was pitched it for our business to visualize how landscapes were changing, and I was like, it is awful, I'm not touching it.
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: And I've said no for such a period, that's why I agreed to go back and see it again.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Because I'm like, tech moves on, let's see where we are.
• 41:38
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, okay, I can to the point where I was watching this, and and I love roller coasters and don't get queasy, but for a second, I was like, I thought I was gonna fall off my stool.
• 41:46
  SPEAKER_00: It was so realistic.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, yeah, it's it.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's gonna be the the future because what you want is you know, at the moment you're seeing the game from where you'd be watching on TV, and obviously you're not playing the game from where you'd be watching on TV.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that's gonna be the big opportunities, you know, getting the ball and then being able to look and go, okay, that's the space, so that's what they've done for the previous five games, so this is where I'm gonna go.
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so I think that's probably the future um and where the opportunities are.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, there will still be some of those opportunities just kind of laying out there for uh to identify what the opposition is doing and stop them before before it happens, but probably fewer than there were six or seven years ago.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: What one of the things we do, so when when I'm reading all the books from your world and football and cricket, I love them because no one uses data in business really.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we we've built um, so um our our business is one of the biggest natural capital companies in the world now.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: We've got 50,000 acres across the UK, 12 estates, we've gone from an idea that didn't exist as a sport to 50 people now, and it's allowing us to pick out people.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_00: But if if you put it in almost a rugby analogy, we were building a sport that didn't exist to a set number of players that didn't exist and having to define the positions in real time.
• 43:07
  SPEAKER_00: But what we've exceeded and excelled at doing, so our head of people, he has a PhD in uh performance psychology and is a statistician.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: Right, so we have we have found people and we've prioritized culture and intangibles and all the things that would show up on film but aren't experienced because you couldn't have experience in this sector.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so everyone else would look for traditional land agents or traditional finance people.
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: Well, A um, does it happen the same in rugby that people overpay for experience?
• 43:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, very much so.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Very, very much so.
• 43:37
  SPEAKER_01: You you you pay for what has come before, not what you're gonna do next.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's what we refuse to do.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so we're like, we're not gonna pay you for what you did for another team, we will pay for what you're gonna do for us, and that's given us a massive competitive advantage.
• 43:50
  SPEAKER_00: So um we we run the leading intern programme in the sector, so we have thousands of applicants every year for uh effective, we call it an intern programme, but it's a feeder system.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's like the class of ninety two for Man United.
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_00: So we've got 15 people, early 20s, who are gonna be MDs and CEOs in the future, but we've got them so early.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_00: And it gives us such an accelerant into the business in terms of that.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: Are we seeing that those type of setups in rugby in terms of the feeder structures and the akin to what the Premier League football clubs used to have?
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so that's a a really big part of it, I think.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: Um, where we're seeing young players being brought up through the academy system.
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you're getting, you know, and this is a great example of really where analysis is is great.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: You're able to identify quite early on who's got the qualities that are acquired.
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um I remember there being a controversial post, maybe this was six, seven years ago.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the Leslie Tigers, and they put out this post and they said, you know, local school kids come down for a trial, uh, and they put a bunch of like, you know, willingness to succeed, you know, this kind of stuff.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the things was over six foot and over 18 scoring, or you know, whatever it might be.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: And there's load of people going, oh, that's so sad that that's what the beers, and all that kind of stuff.
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: But the problem is there's very few examples of people who've succeeded who aren't that kind of physically well um well built or or well able to succeed.
• 45:15
  SPEAKER_01: And so you end up in a situation where it just makes sense to do that, but then that is cyclical because by excluding the people who haven't made it before, you exclude the people who can't who haven't won't go make it in the future, and then so in five years' time when that happens again, there's even fewer examples of people who've broken through um who are you know shorter than six foot or lighter compared to most of the players.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so I think uh so yeah, to go back to the point, there is a lot of that feeder system happening, and it's good for clubs because they get access to players who might be exceptional on a much lower pay than they should be.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and for the players, then it gives them the opportunity to then get paid a huge amount.
• 45:57
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a consequence of the salary cut, yeah.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Uh which I I love the idea of restrictions because without them, everything just becomes the same.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, actually, by forcing those restrictions and constraints, you're making people be more innovative and spend it.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_00: So, say for example, Northampton do pay Henry that amount.
• 46:16
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's eight other players that aren't getting paid.
• 46:19
  SPEAKER_00: And I I'm yet to see a model where what maybe Lionel Messi, maybe he's the only example of, but it didn't work at PSG.
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_00: He had to leave there and then they won European Cups after it.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: Um, just on the way past, and I can't remember the book, I don't want to wrongfully accredit it.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_00: There was a controversy in cricket where I think they'd worked out the length of your wrist to elbow was the most predominant indicator for international bowlers at an early age.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: So like they would measure arm length at like the teens, and they decided that was completely inappropriate for some reason.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm never sure I fully understood it.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, obviously it's like lever length for speed bowling or something like that, and people grow at different rates, but I suppose that's akin to the we want you to be over six foot, and when you look at international players now, as you say, the vast majority fit a certain profile.
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Where where I think you do find uh I I I can't remember the exact line, I did note it, but almost I scribbled it in the margin when um in fact, uh so whenever I read a book, I highlight scribble in the market, I I study books, and then now with AI, and I've I've wanted to do this for years, but I've waited until AI arrived.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um, we now flick through the book, video it, put it into AI, and it makes all my notes into a single library of everything I've read from a book.
• 47:36
  SPEAKER_00: So we're about 40 books into the hundreds are on my bookshelf with you, and it AI gives us a summary, and it says, You must have loved this one because you wrote on every page.
• 47:44
  SPEAKER_00: So that's lovely to hear.
• 47:46
  SPEAKER_00: Bravo on bravo on the book.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things that it made me realize is you almost get that dub when you do something unique and different, you get a double benefit.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: The benefit you get is the other team don't know how to deal with it or manage it.
• 47:58
  SPEAKER_00: So in cricket, left arm spin bowlers.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: No idea how to deal with it because they didn't get the mental reps of seeing it.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the other thing you get is those unique players are also cheaper as a result.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: So in the rugby world, yes, you want them to be six foot plus and bigger.
• 48:13
  SPEAKER_00: The ones that aren't are already cheaper, and people aren't used to dealing with that level of agility or the ability to turn on the spot.
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: The best examples I remember that playing out are in the NFL, the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers for years would go get the defensive ends, and the defensive ends are essentially like your halfway between your second row and your flankers in rugby.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_00: They were the big attacking defenders, they wanted them all to be six foot five, elite sprinters, etc.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_00: Anyone who was under under six three, probably even under six foot, most of the teams would go, no, you're too small.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: But instead, the Ravens and the Steelers would go, no, no, we'll play two of them instead of one, and we'll have a different setup, and they'd get them at half the price effectively and run a completely different system.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_00: Have we got some examples in the rugby world where people have intentionally done that different perspective?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I to be honest, England, you're doing it uh recently.
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I I guess you might argue to what success, but um, they are picking back those who are very small and they're trying to beat teams um with agility and speed and and kind of um ability to get down the park because you're going head to head with you know South Africa and you you can't get bigger than that.
• 49:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you're not gonna outmuscle them.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: So like do you just go for the someone who's a little bit lighter, in which case, well, you still won't outmuscle them and you won't have any of the other benefits.
• 49:35
  SPEAKER_00: And when they model it out, 99 times out of 100, you'll lose by fewer points, but you'll still lose.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 49:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's exactly it.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: Is uh and you saw this with uh actually with that Japan South Africa game in 2015, where you know no one expected that was going to be anything other than a fairly comfortable South African wing.
• 49:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but certainly if you were if you were looking at it, you would say the the reason for that is South Africa the bigger and they're just going to dominate the scrum.
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: And you look at what Japan did, and they got the ball in and out of the scrums as quick as they possibly could, um, which is obviously an option available to everyone, but most teams wouldn't do that because you know it looks a bit soft.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: You're just avoiding the fight, you're just pulling it in and getting it out there, and then there's no scrum to be high.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: Um but what they were doing was they were going, well, we can't win on that.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: So as long as we have fewer options than that, then we'll be good.
• 50:27
  SPEAKER_01: One of the best games I think I've ever seen was a France-South Africa semi-final, uh quarterfinal even in 2023, where uh the famous kind of South Africa called the mark uh to have the scrum in their own heart, in their own 22, um, which is just you know, I won't go into the specifics, but oh no, totally unheard of.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: But what they were saying was if we have more scrums in this game, we'll win.
• 50:50
  SPEAKER_01: So we're going to take every single opportunity we can to have a scrum.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so um, yeah, with England with the with the quick backs, but also France did a great job of picking up you know Georgian props who you know, we even in in the UK pre-Brexit, we've we've never had, I guess they won't be impacted by Brexit, but we've just never gone for them.
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a lot when I speak to to recruitment people in the game in the premiership, they are worried about making a mistake they can't explain.
• 51:22
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so they can't be the biggest crossover in business I see.
• 51:25
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's happy for you to fail in the obvious way.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, as long as you fail in the same way that everyone else fails, no one gets sacked.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_00: Literally having this conversation with chief investment officers at pension funds at the moment, yeah.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's the the echoes of sport are amazing.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_00: So they have an average term of something like three to four years once enroll.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: As long as they make an investment that makes perfect sense to make, even if everyone knows it's not gonna do very well, that's fine.
• 51:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: If they try and do something different, even if there's a 10x opportunity to do it, it doesn't work.
• 51:51
  SPEAKER_00: And that's culturally so different from uh a US psyche which says, no, no, in venture capital, we expect 90 of these out of 100 to go wrong, but the 10 that go right are going to pay for everything else.
• 52:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: And you will see, I won't say name games, but you'll see players in the premiership who go from club to club to club to club to club, never succeeding, always getting paid above the odds, but they fit the profile.
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_01: They're 27 plus, they're totally counter money ball, isn't it?
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's literally the thesis that was advocated the other way.
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, exactly that.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_01: And and what you don't see very much of at all, and what what you do see successfully in kind of um you know uh French is players going up, teams going, we're gonna look in this part of the world that no one else is looking at.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um actually I'm a big cycling fan, and there was you you would not have seen when I first started watching cycling in the early 2000s, nobody came from Africa.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely no one, despite the fact Africa obviously dominates middle distance and long distance learning, but you just wouldn't see anyone coming from Africa.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and then a couple of people broke through.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: Billion Gamai?
• 52:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: He'd be the big one now.
• 52:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and suddenly, I mean, it's not like there's loads of African cyclists now, but there's there's you know, maybe 10, 15, 20 times more than there were before, and that is purely because one person succeeded, and it was no longer embalising to to pick an African cyclist who might fail.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: You're seeing it in the UFC now with African athletes and fighters as well.
• 53:20
  SPEAKER_00: It's um you do need that one, don't you?
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_00: You need the first one, yeah, and then it makes it more acceptable for other people to take a risk.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and then we still I think one of the things we've done so different in business is be ambitious and audacious and actually try and do the thing that's different.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, I I'm really fortunate that the funding we've attracted have backed us to do that.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because to to do that different recruiting approach, that different style of rugby, you need a board that is saying to you, we've got your back, it's fine.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: Otherwise, no one tries anything different and you just end up being homogenous the same.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I you see it with I mean, my club is the Scarlets, and I've followed them since I was you know five, kind of pressed gang into it by my dad, and they have got progressively worse in that time.
• 54:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and they used to be like shifting baseline syndrome because you only get a little bit worse each time.
• 54:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you just kind of get used to it.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas if you fall off a cliff, then people change things or change differently.
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if it's five percent, it can always change next year with a crisis.
• 54:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 54:21
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly that.
• 54:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I remember doing some analysis where I was looking at kind of where they were, and when I was a kid, they were like Fiji, you know, they attack from anywhere, play how they want, go wild, left, right, you know, some amazing tries were scored by by that Scarlet's team, and then the incarnations after the woods.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, if you plot them on a style graph, they're mid-pack, and you think, well, it's not working because we're we're worse than we were we were 20 years ago.
• 54:50
  SPEAKER_01: And also the URC and now the Prem, there is no delegation, so it doesn't really matter if you finish bottom or if you finish make table.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you should give it a go.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if you're gonna finish 14th or 10th in the Prem, why not try and finish 8th by doing something totally different?
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: Because the worst you can finish is 10th, which you already are.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you see it with Newcastle as well.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: Newcastle, you know, they've had a lot of investment, but they've been terrible for the last few years.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you might look at them and go, Well, uh maybe they're playing a totally different way, you know, maybe they just make the most of this crisis and they've gone, you know what, we're gonna zag when everyone else is zigging, but they are, they're playing uh mid-pack, and they just a style which is not particularly unique, and so whenever someone plays them, they've got a better side.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they also play a team who plays like everyone else, but slightly worse.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: And so you think, well, what's the point?
• 55:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, why why is why is that acceptable?
• 55:53
  SPEAKER_01: But someone coming in and going, nope, we're gonna do it totally differently.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna recruit differently, we're gonna play.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna have we're gonna have 11 centres on the pitch.
• 56:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: What what if what happens if we put in a super light pack, or we just pick out really heavy guys, or we recruit from the champ?
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: So um, a really good example, uh, so Stuart Lancaster, who was in charge of England in 2011, 15, 11, 15.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he his son Dan Lancaster um played for Ealing, who uh you know, champ kind of well best team in the champ, but can't get promoted to the to the Prem.
• 56:28
  SPEAKER_01: And he was a you know perfectly good mid-pack player.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, Stuart Lancaster went to Rassing '92 in in Palace and he bought Dan over.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_01: And it was a little bit of a kind of a this is kind of nepotism and this is looks a bit silly.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then an injury crisis hit, and Dan Lancaster was the starting fly half for Racing, and he was great, he was absolutely brilliant.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_01: He was no worse than anyone they had before.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: He led that team amazingly, and everyone, including myself, who thought this is a bit of a silly uh signing, were like, oh, okay, we got that that completely wrong.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: But one of the factors of that is it asks the question: if you just give someone an opportunity, maybe they'll be really good.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like maybe everyone who is already so so there's like a paradox, or maybe not paradox, but a self-fulfilling prophecy, where if I pick a player who made the academy, never got kicked out, has played regular or semi-regularly for a uh premiership side, I am going along with the opinion of maybe eight or nine coaches who've all said, Yep, this player is good enough to get to the next level or good enough to be played consistently.
• 57:35
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the the second I pick someone who's in the championship or who's had to go to a lower level French league or has hacked to go to America, I am saying I back my own judgment better than whoever, whichever coach it was, who to say that player shouldn't be in this team anymore and should be moved on.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: And a lot of coaches just aren't willing to do that, despite the fact that who knows what that coach was.
• 57:56
  SPEAKER_01: Like we've all worked with people who are bad.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: There's no guarantee that that coach wasn't terrible who made a really bad decision.
• 58:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um structural fit in terms of playing system has such a difference as well.
• 58:07
  SPEAKER_00: So, um, for example, we we have a very um adventurous, outdoor-oriented like the the team is full of athletes, uh our team is full of athletes of some kind, be it weightlifters, bodybuilders, elite-level runners, swimmers.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_00: If if you want a nine to five job where you're in an office processing things all day and you go home and check out, and that's what you want your life to be, we would not be a fit for you.
• 58:35
  SPEAKER_00: You could be the best person in that corporate environment.
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_00: We would not be a fit.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: You take some of our most amazing talented performers and you try and put them in a corporate environment, they would hate it too.
• 58:44
  SPEAKER_00: The playing style and how you fit in and everything around it as well.
• 58:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like um, I read Carlo Ancelotti's book recently.
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: Have you read it?
• 58:52
  SPEAKER_00: No, I've not.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 58:54
  SPEAKER_00: I think what he's done beautifully is he's taken his coaching style and applied it in Germany and France and Italy and England and now Brazil.
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, it's still football, but everything else is different.
• 59:06
  SPEAKER_00: So the way you have to speak to the players, the way you structure things.
• 59:09
  SPEAKER_00: I remember an analogy where he came to Chelsea and he sat down with like, and this is Lampard and Terry at the time, and he said, Okay, in Italy we train twice a day at this time and this time, and they went, We're not doing that.
• 59:19
  SPEAKER_00: We train once a day, and he's like, Okay, understood.
• 59:21
  SPEAKER_00: He said, We try and train early in the morning in Italy.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: Nope, can't do that.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_00: The lads need to take their kids to school, then we come in, you can have us in from 10.
• 59:27
  SPEAKER_00: And he's like, Okay, understood that.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_00: So he flexed on those bits to make it fit with the structure of lifestyle and how things were, but was like, What I need from you is to train like this and this and this, and I need this on the nutrition side, and there you go.
• 59:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because he developed the maturity to say, okay, I can adjust and flex.
• 59:42
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas a younger manager comes in and goes, No, no, no, it's my way we do this, someone like an Amarim at Man United, yeah, where it bombs because the player's like, we're not doing that.
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 59:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you've got to like know when to flex.
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think fit has such a it does.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_01: I and I think also I was speaking to a football agent about a English manager who has gone, who has always been employed, but there's a particular type of English manager, kind of very 442, very kind of bloody faced.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: People may be able to work out who it is based on that.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but he was saying that that he he worked with this guy and he was absolutely awful.
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_01: You know, he was uh completely unchanging.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_01: He played, I don't know, in the sixties maybe, and he coached what he knew from playing.
• 1:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and it suited a particular type of player who was at that club, you know, white British basically.
• 1:00:34
  SPEAKER_01: But there was a bunch of other players who came who were like, this is so backwards.
• 1:00:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um but there was always enough people who were like, Yeah, this is great, I love this, that at no point, yeah, it's fine.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and so, and that that guy has is gone, as I say, club to club to club, and has has always done basically the same thing, and there's been no journal, there's been no development.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you you do see that in business a lot, where people are willing to flex to a very small degree.
• 1:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: I think, you know, there you know, I think COVID gave people a lot of flexibility, which when it's come back, that's there's been that kind of feeling of it being slightly eroded, and it's got to the point where it's like um it's better than it was before, but it's worse than it was more recently.
• 1:01:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's pulling back right the f the freedom and flexibility to work.
• 1:01:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm so I'm 43, and I think I'm the last generation of CEOs and founders that will even have a choice about whether people work flexibly or not.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think the next ones coming through will be like, no, no, no, if you want talent, you have to make it flexible for very few people want to be in it.
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_00: Unless you can offer a Google or an OpenAI campus, no one wants to come into an office because the commute's just not worth it and the sacrifice you make on the other end of life's not worth it.
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: If you want the most talented, best people in there, you've got to create environments where they where they want to be.
• 1:01:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I I remember my my first corporate job.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um I was it was yeah, it was nominally a nine to five thirty, I guess.
• 1:02:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I thought, you know, well, nine is like 8.30 to 9.15, 9.20 or something.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like that's kind of anywhere in that margin is is fine.
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: After about a week, I think for for the first week I was like, I'll get there for nine.
• 1:02:18
  SPEAKER_01: Second week I was like, well, it seems fine to be five minutes, ten minutes, whatever.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I was pulled from side and said, no, no, no, you can't, you have to come here.
• 1:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: You you you I don't care if it's 8.40 or if it's at 8.59, but it has to be before nine.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_01: Whilst at the other end, our Mondays were stretching to eight o'clock, eight thirty, and no one was going, well, it's 5.31, you have to be out the out the door.
• 1:02:38
  SPEAKER_01: And it was that feeling of like, you know, in hindsight, it was this person is um they they have very little control, this manager, but one thing they can control is they can look at all the clock.
• 1:02:50
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you see that a lot in in all sport, but you know, there'll be certainly one of them where you have got a squad of 45 players, you know, you've got an opposition of 45 players plus 15, 20 background staff who are all trying to make your life disorgan disorganized and make the game on Saturday as unpredictable as it is possible to be.
• 1:03:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so you just reach for anything you can control.
• 1:03:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know, will we start training at this time, we do this, we get it.
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_00: Especially when the results go badly, everyone tightens down, tightens down, and then you know that they're going.
• 1:03:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's gonna capitulate at that point.
• 1:03:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in terms of that difference of playing and style, are there teams and pick any league around the world you want where you're seeing something unique come and you think, oh, that is gonna make its way to the premiership or internationally?
• 1:03:38
  SPEAKER_00: What are the changes you're excited about?
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so uh it's actually coming from the women's game.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: So uh there's a clear.
• 1:03:47
  SPEAKER_00: If you want to see the next evolution, so we've got Tim Wigmore on the podcast tomorrow in Crickonomics, he writes about how and and they also feel more comfortable to trial things in the women's game, yeah.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_00: So you can see that different point.
• 1:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: And if what's the quote?
• 1:03:59
  SPEAKER_00: Something like if you want to know what the men's game is going to be like in three years, watch women's cricket.
• 1:04:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's that's really fascinating because I'd say it's exactly the same in England where so you can look at a start of um carry percentage meters.
• 1:04:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, how many meters does a team carry versus their total metres?
• 1:04:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that would be kicks and carries.
• 1:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: So at England's really kind of dour worst before the 2023 World Cup, when Steve Borfwood came in and was just like, if we're gonna win, we just have to strip everything back, they would be carrying for about 28% of all of their metres, so kicking what what that what's that, three times more than they carry, I guess.
• 1:04:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um whereas in the women's game, even the the least, you know, the most pragmatic team will still be carrying more than 50% of the time.
• 1:04:44
  SPEAKER_01: And that number has gone up and up and up and up in in the men's game.
• 1:04:48
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and partly that's because teams are still kicking as much, but they're kicking a lot shorter because they want to compete for the ball and they want to continue that attack.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's interesting in the women's game because you might expect because they're carrying so much, they're getting loads more benefit from that.
• 1:05:02
  SPEAKER_01: So they're breaking through tackles, they're carrying for loads more meters, they're you know, they're scoring loads more tries.
• 1:05:07
  SPEAKER_01: But that's not what's actually happening.
• 1:05:09
  SPEAKER_01: They're just carrying a lot more, but they're not necessarily getting through at a any greater they show than the men are.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um so which I think will cap it, because I think if you just say, well, let's carry 90% of our total meters, you'll just find that you just wear yourself out and running into a brick wall.
• 1:05:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think we won't go back to those times where I mean the I I love Frank Shrugby, and the pro you do is if anyone ever gets a chance, if you're in France, go and watch a game, it's an unbelievable experience.
• 1:05:36
  SPEAKER_01: But it's pragmatic, and so they even uh in recent years, you the most aggressive team might be just carrying pushing 40% of their total meters.
• 1:05:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but even there it's starting to change and shift and and become much more of a balling hand game, and that's being driven by the fact that the women's game has shown that it's it's possible.
• 1:05:56
  SPEAKER_00: So if I bought a team tomorrow, yeah, brought you on board as I don't know what the rugby title is, but in the NFL, it'll be head of player development or player personnel or whatever.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_00: And I said, right, we're going to take advantage of a few of the things you've talked about.
• 1:06:08
  SPEAKER_00: So you've said the ball's in play 40 about 35 to 40 minutes.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_00: So we are going to pull together the fittest team it's possible to have.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:18
  SPEAKER_00: And we're going to put that ball in play 60 minutes.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:20
  SPEAKER_00: So a bit like um, I think this is from Gilbert Anoki's book with the all blacks about how their thing was we'll win in the last 20 minutes.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:06:30
  SPEAKER_00: We are going to be fitter in the last, it doesn't matter about the first 60.
• 1:06:33
  SPEAKER_00: We are going to be so much fitter than you were going to win in the last 20 minutes.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_00: I I literally coach that in business.
• 1:06:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we talk about quarter four.
• 1:06:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um, in fact, you'll like this story.
• 1:06:41
  SPEAKER_00: So we run our intern assessment process October, November into December, and we do the final assessments.
• 1:06:48
  SPEAKER_00: We bring in like 20 or 30 people.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit like the NFL combined, right?
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: We bring them to an assessment center on one of our estates, the whole team gets involved, and this is literally the last day of the year.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: The reason I do that is the whole team comes together, assesses the future talent that they're going to be working with, and we have a Christmas party on the last day because everyone works right up to the last day of the year.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas how many businesses shut down at the beginning of December and just half-arse it through a month?
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you've lost a twelfth of your year at that point.
• 1:07:13
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas we accelerate through, and actually that's our fastest.
• 1:07:16
  SPEAKER_00: So almost I stack it and massively coach October, November, that's separation season for us.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_00: When everyone else is easing off, that's when we go harder.
• 1:07:24
  SPEAKER_00: And I stole that from the old blacks in in terms of doing it.
• 1:07:27
  SPEAKER_00: So if I said to you, right, you need to go out and find me a team that is going to keep the ball in place 60% of the time.
• 1:07:33
  SPEAKER_00: Do you think you could be competitive with that because you are looking for something that's completely different?
• 1:07:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so I think you could.
• 1:07:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think there would be an actual point where it would work for a bit and then you'd have to pivot towards something a bit more because everyone would adapt around it.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I think so.
• 1:07:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've I think that um there has been examples of this in in various sports, mouth football, basketball, where teams have gone, let's just do something totally wild.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it works.
• 1:08:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was uh was it the Philadelphia Eagles did that with that chap, I can't remember what his name was, yeah.
• 1:08:05
  SPEAKER_01: But they were like, we're just gonna go, we're just gonna be uh no huddle.
• 1:08:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's the one, yeah.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_01: Just no hudgel all the time, all the time.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_00: It worked amazingly well in college, yes, where he could recruit.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_00: So in college, you're not limited to who you can bring in, but in the NFL, everyone gets ranked order in terms of picks.
• 1:08:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the better analogy, I think, it that worked really well in the NFL was the Denver Broncos did it for a long time in terms of because they were playing altitude, yeah, they would hire really small, fast, agile defenders and would train at altitude.
• 1:08:33
  SPEAKER_00: So everyone who else who turned up, yeah, their lungs were done in the second quarter, but Denver were lighter, faster, and they were acclimatized.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:08:41
  SPEAKER_00: So I think if we we haven't got enough altitude, we'd have to build a stadium on the top of like Ben Nevis or something.
• 1:08:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:08:48
  SPEAKER_01: Or go do um I'm going cycling how you can get um altitude tents and.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_00: Have you followed the tour this year?
• 1:08:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:08:56
  SPEAKER_00: So uh I didn't know we were gonna talk about cycling.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: I love it too.
• 1:08:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:08:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um I it's it's Dave Brailsford's fault.
• 1:09:01
  SPEAKER_00: I love it.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that was my kind of gateway in the marginal gain side of it and and and all that stuff.
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_00: Some of the inside team sky type books were were epically good in the day.
• 1:09:11
  SPEAKER_00: Um, they're talking now about, let me get this the right way.
• 1:09:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's either train at altitude and sleep at ground, or the other way around.
• 1:09:19
  SPEAKER_00: Live way around, yeah.
• 1:09:21
  SPEAKER_00: So train on the ground and sleep at and live at altitude.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_00: So are we starting to see anything like that enter a bear?
• 1:09:27
  SPEAKER_01: So South Africa, when they play at Johannesburg, I'm not sure exactly how how high that is, but it's it's pushing 2,000 metres.
• 1:09:34
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's quite 2,000 metres.
• 1:09:36
  SPEAKER_01: But um, that is always like, you know, teams did literally do start to.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_01: Have you been to see a game there?
• 1:09:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think no, I'd love to.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think I so I digged, uh I climbed my brother's big climber or my dad's big climber, and they pulled me up most probably like 12, a big mountain Switzerland.
• 1:09:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was 4,000 metres, but you could basically get like three quarters of the way up there.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_01: I just find it unbelievable.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_01: It was hideous.
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_01: I went to Angdola actually in 2020 to do some cycling.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the high point of Angdola, I think, is 2,700 metres.
• 1:10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I, you know, because obviously I'm into my stats, I've got all my power meter and all that kind of stuff.
• 1:10:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, well, I can sustain this power at home for an hour, this should be fine.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it's quite a lot lower than that.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember looking at my heartlet and thinking, oh wow, it's just decoupled now because I'm at 2,000 metres and I can no longer push that power, which is one of the reasons why, yeah, they they try and train low, because you can still have you can still go as high as you possibly can, and then by living at a high altitude, you get then the bloat adaptation.
• 1:10:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, but I think we will see more of that because as you say, if we want to build that team that just goes as fast as we can and keeps the ball in play for as long as we possibly can, um, you will I think you'll need to do something like that.
• 1:10:50
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a few teams in in France who have done their pre-season up at ski the sorts.
• 1:10:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so they're you know getting it up to 2,000 metres or so.
• 1:10:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's um a theme that's running throughout a lot of these discussion points, the the impact of an action having an opposite reaction.
• 1:11:06
  SPEAKER_00: So you ever read Life Imitates Chess by Gary Kasparov?
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_01: No, I haven't.
• 1:11:10
  SPEAKER_00: So good, so good.
• 1:11:11
  SPEAKER_00: And essentially his point is if you move a piece and it's successful for you, inherently it's negative on someone else.
• 1:11:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:19
  SPEAKER_00: And one thing he teaches is um whatever the state of the board is, you play the board as if you've just found it.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_00: So it's like, what opportunity do I have now that I didn't have before?
• 1:11:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that about Rugby.
• 1:11:29
  SPEAKER_00: So if we put together that Uber fast team, it's a bit like what you said about the line outs from your your early days, yeah.
• 1:11:34
  SPEAKER_00: Someone's going to react to it and it's going to change it.
• 1:11:36
  SPEAKER_00: So, and I think we we're starting to see that in some sports, that second order thinking.
• 1:11:40
  SPEAKER_00: If I do X and we know they're going to do Y, what's Z?
• 1:11:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen that play out in the stats at all?
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_00: That sort of reactive thing.
• 1:11:49
  SPEAKER_00: Almost um, the NFL have it beautifully.
• 1:11:51
  SPEAKER_00: They have an offense which they call an option system, yeah, where they would like they're gonna do a run.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_00: If a person steps left or right, they'll make a different choice.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Are we seeing that come through?
• 1:11:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so one of the things I think that actually North Ampsion replotting, which is uh just beautiful to watch where it works well, is so you can imagine as um if you've ever played as a kid out there, you know, you you might be taught to to run straight, learn to defender, and then try and pass to someone who is unmarked because you've taken out the defender.
• 1:12:19
  SPEAKER_01: So it's quite simple, you know, you might have three three attackers, two defenders, attacker one runs at defender one, passes a ball to attacker two who runs at defender two, pass the ball to attacker three who's unmarked and can just go through.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_01: What North Ampton are doing a really good job of is rather than having all those passes, they overload a space.
• 1:12:38
  SPEAKER_01: So they just run loads of people at one space, um, and they they don't need to then string all those passes together.
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: And what they're trying to do is they're targeting the space between two defenders, because if you target the space between two defenders, the you the person who will have to step in, then the the next reaction is well, the person outside them, do they step in?
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_01: Do they stay out?
• 1:13:01
  SPEAKER_01: If they step in, then there's space outside them.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_01: If they don't step in, they'll pass put someone through.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_01: So it creates that exactly what you say, that option attack where you just rung at someone and you you go, okay, he steps in, I'm passing, he's not stepping, I'm ringing, he steps in, I'm passing that way.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you just keep doing that, you're not putting a huge amount of pressure on the skills.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you the the big skill is reading what's happening, but the skill of passing, you'll only need passing three metres either way, even less than that, maybe.
• 1:13:30
  SPEAKER_01: So you should be able to do that, and a lot of players are now doing that just without looking.
• 1:13:35
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you'll see them, you know, if you follow any of the kind of pre-season Instagrams uh of players or clubs, you just will see forwards pass catching the ball and flick it behind them without looking.
• 1:13:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, just constantly doing that because what they're trying to do is they're going, I'm gonna look up up ahead of what's going on, and I know I can go left, I can go right, I can go straight, or I can chuck the ball basically over my shoulder.
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: And they don't want to have to think about that pass, they want to just go, what's happened?
• 1:14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, I'm gonna carry this or I'm gonna flick it over my shoulder.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so defensively, it's like, well, what do you do?
• 1:14:12
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you whatever you do, if the put if the opposition's good enough, you can't cover it.
• 1:14:18
  SPEAKER_01: You just you just can't cover everything that they've got.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and this is like a fundamental part of the is that, and really is it's kind of a wung in the eye for analysis, is that ultimately you just can't stop certain things.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if if the opposition gets going forward, they get over the top of you, they start going forwards, um, they start getting the momentum.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_01: There's only so much you can do.
• 1:14:39
  SPEAKER_01: You you can't you're relying on one amazing action to stop that from happening.
• 1:14:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and you see this a little bit with again with medical football, that kind of bend and don't break defence, where you're basically saying to the attack, five, yeah, if you can flow the ball five yards, keep throwing the ball five yards.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: But I bet you can't throw it 15 yards.
• 1:14:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly that.
• 1:15:01
  SPEAKER_00: Are we um I hate bend and break defenses?
• 1:15:04
  SPEAKER_00: I I so so I we haven't talked about this.
• 1:15:08
  SPEAKER_00: So I played American football for Great Britain.
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well that was my sport out in the US and I played defence.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, um, we played a very aggressive style of defence to take the ball away.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: And I think I think that's the next evolution of rugby I'm excited about because people always focus on the ball in hand and the the offense.
• 1:15:25
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, I think the value, the game-changing innovations are going to be found on the defensive side of things.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um who excites you at the moment in terms of how they're playing defense?
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I think South Africa are probably the most interesting.
• 1:15:38
  SPEAKER_01: So they're you see we've just seen this in 2023.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: There would be situations where if you were in the stadium, you'd think, What are they doing?
• 1:15:46
  SPEAKER_01: They're they're only defending with 10 people because that's the only way that there could be that much space out wide.
• 1:15:51
  SPEAKER_01: But what they're saying is the only thing that hurts us is the ball.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we stop the ball and everything else falls apart.
• 1:15:58
  SPEAKER_01: You see this, um, you know, a coach at a lower level, and especially kind of adults, kigs are great because kigs will just kind of, as long as it's not obviously stupid, we'll just do what you tell what you say.
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas adults, especially adult men, will be like, Well, I learned this 20 years ago.
• 1:16:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's still right.
• 1:16:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's still right, yeah.
• 1:16:17
  SPEAKER_01: And what they will do is they will just man-mark, you know, every defender marks an attacker.
• 1:16:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the the issue with that is if you miss a tackle, there's nobody there to stop that plan.
• 1:16:27
  SPEAKER_00: Also, if if that if that goes to the best of the plan, if that goes exactly as it's meant to, whoever has the best athletes win.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:16:35
  SPEAKER_00: So it only works if you are objectively the better athletes, athletes, and team.
• 1:16:40
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_00: In the best case scenario.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:16:42
  SPEAKER_00: So you better make sure you are, or don't even try that, or you're trying to lose.
• 1:16:45
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:16:46
  SPEAKER_01: And it also requires not only the kind of the best athletes on paper, but requires someone telling you, you know, not have a terrible day defensively.
• 1:16:54
  SPEAKER_00: And and everyone to be good.
• 1:16:55
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you've got one weak link, that's where they go.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:16:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so the idea of saying to them, yo, just creeping, creeping, creeping.
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_01: I remember speaking to a um to a winger about this, and I was telling him, look, leave your opposition winger just creeping so you're supporting the man on the inside.
• 1:17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, and he's saying, Well, yeah, but the problem is if the winger gets the ball and lungs than me, I look really stupid.
• 1:17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking, that's an interesting point because it's kind of true, just like you're saying, like, because you are obviously to blame, but the opp the alternative is if you just don't if if if you stand there way out on your wing and you look and everyone just runs through the middle five, six tries, it's not your fault, but it is your fault.
• 1:17:40
  SPEAKER_00: Like it definitely got blamed.
• 1:17:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's the thing.
• 1:17:43
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna look at the guy who missed the tackle, and a lot of the time, especially again at a lower level, it's so kind of macho that instead of saying we're gonna make, you know, instead of saying, look, even the best team out there will probably only make 87% of our tackles, which means that in this situation where we mark one on one, uh every ninth Kali or 10th Kelly or whatever will go through.
• 1:18:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, then you're but you're saying, Yeah, but yeah, but we we won't miss tackles.
• 1:18:13
  SPEAKER_01: You're thinking, yeah, but we will miss tackles, we just will miss tackles, and we haven't had we haven't got any uh backup option in if that happens.
• 1:18:20
  SPEAKER_01: So what South Africa is saying is um we we we know we'll miss a tackle, but we're gonna have somewhere else there to immediately make that tackle.
• 1:18:29
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't matter if we've left someone in like an alpine meadow of space out there.
• 1:18:33
  SPEAKER_00: So what's the what's the odds at anything below elite level that anyone can make that crossfield kick?
• 1:18:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very low.
• 1:18:41
  SPEAKER_01: 2% of the kids.
• 1:18:42
  SPEAKER_01: Very low.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like and you want them to do it because it might work, but all the times it doesn't work.
• 1:18:46
  SPEAKER_01: 98% it's a good outcome for you.
• 1:18:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:18:49
  SPEAKER_00: So interesting.
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um what so much of it crosses over to business.
• 1:18:54
  SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I I have a rule.
• 1:18:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, if something goes wrong in the business, it's my fault.
• 1:18:59
  SPEAKER_00: Wherever it is.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:00
  SPEAKER_00: What I love about that is it gives people the ability to play free.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_00: So we we had we had a screw up in an admin part of the business yesterday, and my P PA came to me and said, Okay, this has happened, this has happened.
• 1:19:11
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like, cool, what's the plan?
• 1:19:12
  SPEAKER_00: Right, we're gonna do this, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:19:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she said, it was awesome knowing you weren't gonna be mad and nothing bad was gonna happen.
• 1:19:17
  SPEAKER_00: It meant I didn't feel the need.
• 1:19:19
  SPEAKER_00: She's only just joined us, she hasn't been with very long.
• 1:19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And she's like, in previous world, I'd have felt the need to kind of like think about how I told you or to position it the right way.
• 1:19:26
  SPEAKER_00: But actually, it's my fault anyway.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Let's crack on.
• 1:19:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:19:29
  SPEAKER_00: The other side of that rule is if someone else does something great, they've done it.
• 1:19:31
  SPEAKER_00: They can so in your winger analogy, if they come in and make a great tackle, great job, it's on you.
• 1:19:36
  SPEAKER_00: If someone runs around them because they've done what we asked them, that's my fault as the coach.
• 1:19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:19:40
  SPEAKER_00: And you've got to give your players or your team members the ability to play free, or they won't.
• 1:19:45
  SPEAKER_00: They'll just lose in the normal way.
• 1:19:47
  SPEAKER_01: I remember um Ross Neal, who does some really good stuff on kind of business and um kind of communications and team building and that kind of stuff.
• 1:19:56
  SPEAKER_01: But he played for Wasps and he played for Lung Young Scottish, I think.
• 1:19:59
  SPEAKER_01: He played Overling uh Seattle in the MLR.
• 1:20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, he tells a great story about playing at Wasps, and he's a big winger, so big, physically imposing guy, and he got the ball and he saw the teammate out wide, and he thought, Well, that pass is on the edge of what I can do, but if I get it there, he's gonna score a try.
• 1:20:18
  SPEAKER_01: And he flung this pass and it didn't work, it got intercepted or didn't go to handy or whatever.
• 1:20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And his coach told him, Don't try that, just put your head down, just lung in a straight line, and he was like, Okay, fine.
• 1:20:30
  SPEAKER_01: And then a few years later, the coach had changed and whatever, whatever, and he got the ball.
• 1:20:33
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly the same situation.
• 1:20:35
  SPEAKER_01: He thought, I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna throw that pass.
• 1:20:37
  SPEAKER_01: He flew the pass, didn't work out this time.
• 1:20:40
  SPEAKER_01: And the coach said, What were you seeing?
• 1:20:43
  SPEAKER_01: And he went, Oh, I I was seeing if I got the ball to him in stride, he scored a try, and I felt that if I didn't and I just carried, we would the opportunity would have gone.
• 1:20:54
  SPEAKER_01: And the coach went, Great, okay, let's work on that long pass.
• 1:20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that that's a key part of what is often missing at Lugby is that the number of players who are told your role is this, do not deviate from from that.
• 1:21:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you will see this very infrequently at international rugby, but you'll see it a lot at um kind of lower down the levels.
• 1:21:14
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, actually, having said you won't see it at international rugby, I actually did see it for France a couple of six nations ago, where there was a line break and it was all on the left-hand side of the pitch, and so it being a long distance, maybe 40-50 metres, so everyone who was quick was over there, and everyone who was slower was filling the rest of the field, and it meant that I can't remember who they're playing now, but if the ball went out, they would score in the in the far side.
• 1:21:38
  SPEAKER_01: But all of those players were forwards, and the ball came out to Yungi Octonio, who who's the side now, but he was like 20 flea stone, and he got the ball and he looked out and he thought, I'm not sure about that, and he just put his head down, Kelly, and the opportunity went.
• 1:21:52
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, I who knows exactly what had gone on and what the messaging had been from the team, but it's it's impossible not to think at some point he's been told, do you don't pass, you're the big 22 cent guy, you put your head down.
• 1:22:05
  SPEAKER_01: And you compare that to him almost He's probably been told it for 20 years.
• 1:22:08
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
• 1:22:09
  SPEAKER_01: He's always been told, big lag, head down, don't exceed, you know, don't do more than you need to.
• 1:22:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, almost exactly the same situation for Bristol.
• 1:22:17
  SPEAKER_01: So Bristol Bears, they focus massively on getting touches, players just constantly passing whatever you're positioning at the expense of other stuff, because obviously you can't train everything.
• 1:22:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the defence is fairly ropey, but the attack is unbelievable.
• 1:22:31
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and they had exactly the same thing: a big prop gets a ball, gives a pass to uh uh maybe a second row, gives a pass out wide, eventually ends up as just going down the line of these forwards, and you know that what's happening in their setup is at no point has anyone said, Nope, you're the 20-stone guy, you put the ball on your on your shoulder and under your arm and you carry.
• 1:22:52
  SPEAKER_01: They've said you play what you see, you give that pass.
• 1:22:54
  SPEAKER_01: If you think the pass is on, you give that pass.
• 1:22:56
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been coached by a lot of guys who were like the you know, one of the kind of the jokes, I guess, at grassroots rubbeing in the UK, I'm sure it's true everywhere, is only give the off load if it's on.
• 1:23:08
  SPEAKER_01: So an offload is you give a pass when you're being tackled.
• 1:23:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's a hard pass you give, it's never going to be guaranteed to be on.
• 1:23:14
  SPEAKER_01: And what the coach means is if you pull it off, I'm happy you did it.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't pull it off, it's your fault, which is impossible as a player to deal with because you're thinking, well, this is even the pause of thought.
• 1:23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you don't have time for that pause of thought.
• 1:23:28
  SPEAKER_00: It was interesting when you were talking about the space earlier.
• 1:23:31
  SPEAKER_00: The other benefit of that type of approach is the cognitive load you put on the defense of making that choice.
• 1:23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:23:38
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you're on an island as a defender and you're like, I am fucked left or right, that's the equivalent of running another hundred metres because the adrenaline, the impact you've got of doing it.
• 1:23:46
  SPEAKER_00: One of the things I love in both sport and business is I think the concept of space and time are the exact same thing.
• 1:23:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because um, you look at like Messi on a football field, because of his body movement, his positioning, and everything, he always looks like he's got loads of time.
• 1:24:01
  SPEAKER_00: He hasn't, he's got no room at all.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's just because he knows where it's going as he receives it ahead of time.
• 1:24:05
  SPEAKER_00: I think that same thing's true in rugby.
• 1:24:07
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're looking after a load of space, the opposition clearly has more time as a result of that because you've got to cover that space.
• 1:24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:24:14
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I remember playing my first ones game when I was at one stage in North East London, and I in that one season I'd gone from third division to uh sort of third team to second team to first team, and I thought I'm just gonna be out of my depth here.
• 1:24:29
  SPEAKER_01: And what I found was everyone does what you think they're gonna do, so it wasn't any harder.
• 1:24:34
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was probably easier than playing in the second team where some people know what you're gonna do and some people haven't played rugby might be or whatever.
• 1:24:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because those mental reps are not worth anything when you're dealing with chaos, exactly.
• 1:24:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it's a bit like playing on a cricket pitch where the occasional ball's gonna not bounce or gonna take your head off.
• 1:24:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's like it's guessing now, yes, yeah, exactly.
• 1:24:53
  SPEAKER_01: I I remember um there was that test, wasn't there, against New Zealand, can't remember which one it was, but this year where the pitch just kind of started to fall apart.
• 1:25:01
  SPEAKER_01: Second test, was it maybe?
• 1:25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was it was that it was like exactly like you said.
• 1:25:07
  SPEAKER_00: Jacob Bethel got one, didn't he?
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_00: That that was the lowest of balls risen in like nine years or something.
• 1:25:11
  SPEAKER_00: He's just like, okay, but you can't do anything with that.
• 1:25:13
  SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting actually because you I think that's a really fascinating point because when you look at the response to that, it was like a lot of commentators were like, there's literally nothing you can do about that.
• 1:25:25
  SPEAKER_01: You can't anticipate that's where the ball would bounce.
• 1:25:27
  SPEAKER_01: You might have just got lucky and kind of dropped you back low enough, but that's essentially it.
• 1:25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Where there's a lot of the um a lot of the cop, you know, the the public, I guess, who on TMS or whatever were saying, oh, he's doing it again, he doesn't play you know he's justn't playing a fed ball cricket, and there's probably a lot of truth to that, but it's interesting that a commentator can say there's literally nothing you can do about that, but everyone else will look at his score of seven or eleven or whatever it is and go, What's his fault?
• 1:25:56
  SPEAKER_00: What have you um what have you made of the baseball era?
• 1:26:00
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's I find it quite uh frustrating the response to it really because when it come when it came in, England were terrible.
• 1:26:14
  SPEAKER_01: What was it, one in 12, one winging 12?
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_01: 19, I think.
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Was it one way in 12?
• 1:26:18
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think they went one in 19, then didn't lose for 19.
• 1:26:22
  SPEAKER_01: Right, yes, yeah.
• 1:26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so it inevitably you look at that and you go, Well, it might be luck.
• 1:26:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not ruling out that it's just luck.
• 1:26:30
  SPEAKER_00: And it definitely was, yeah.
• 1:26:32
  SPEAKER_00: So we can have a whole conversation about luck, but whether people like it or not, a huge chunk of what happens is luck in scenario.
• 1:26:39
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, yeah.
• 1:26:40
  SPEAKER_00: You ever read Thinking and Bets by Annie Dukes?
• 1:26:42
  SPEAKER_00: No, I'm gonna send you that.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, you'll love it.
• 1:26:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, uh, and so there's yeah, the huge amount of of luck, fortune, definitely uh a kind of able teams that they're facing, all that kind of stuff.
• 1:26:53
  SPEAKER_01: But just fundamentally, if you're gonna be someone who looks at outcomes, you look at that outcome and you go, it's much better than what they had before.
• 1:27:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also think there's a huge part of it, which is it is good to take the pressure off people when they're performing.
• 1:27:09
  SPEAKER_01: I completely agree.
• 1:27:11
  SPEAKER_01: And I think you find this because I I mean I was probably exactly like this when I was when I was younger, which was I can't believe he's missed that kick, I can't believe he's missed that penalty, I can't believe he's not made that tackle.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what an idiot, how could he not have made that?
• 1:27:23
  SPEAKER_01: And you speak to the players and you realise, first of all, very basically, young of them are intentionally doing it.
• 1:27:29
  SPEAKER_01: Second of all, the pressure they're under is is unbelievable.
• 1:27:33
  SPEAKER_01: Like there was uh I remember speaking to a guy at Doncaster, so at Doncaster they are coached, I mean they still are by Ian McGeekon, who was you know, Sir Ian McGeekon, who was, you know, like Mr.
• 1:27:43
  SPEAKER_01: Lyons.
• 1:27:44
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but afterwards they go into the the kind of the main cafeteria, I guess, under the stand, and so they're mixing with with fangs.
• 1:27:53
  SPEAKER_01: And the fangs, there was a point where one of the fans was going, that's not good enough, geek.
• 1:27:58
  SPEAKER_01: And he he turned there and went, Fuck off.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember thinking, yeah, it is interesting that you you've got just fans who are just going, I can I can't that's not good enough.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like who have got no concept of what they were trying to do, what the opposition were trying to do.
• 1:28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but anyway, yeah, so back to back to baseball.
• 1:28:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, take the pressure off the players because unless it helps, I think a lot of people think maybe it helps to be miserable, maybe it helps to be shouted at in train sessions.
• 1:28:27
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't, like, absolutely doesn't.
• 1:28:29
  SPEAKER_01: There's no you don't you play with pressure that exists whether you're getting shouted at or not.
• 1:28:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the pressure's there, it just makes an unpleasant environment if you've got a coach yelling at you.
• 1:28:39
  SPEAKER_01: So I think take the pressure off.
• 1:28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think where they oversold it was I think don't speak about your how you're changing the game.
• 1:28:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that probably ruffled people's feathers.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_00: Did they or was that yeah?
• 1:28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Let's put the strict point.
• 1:28:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I don't I don't know the answer to it.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_00: I it's hard in in retro.
• 1:28:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, there was a book published about it, but I don't know if it was about them.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, as in like I I I don't think uh Brendan McCullum like wrote the book.
• 1:29:06
  SPEAKER_00: No, um we expect things to be a binary good or bad, or yes or no, or certainly in our world of environmental stuff, everyone thinks there's an obvious answer, like a black one.
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_00: There really isn't, yeah.
• 1:29:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like the people that are like, oh, all oil and gas are bad.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, great.
• 1:29:21
  SPEAKER_00: What's your plan for having plastics in theatres and surgeries?
• 1:29:25
  SPEAKER_00: What is your plan if you've got family that live on the other side of the world and you want to see them again?
• 1:29:29
  SPEAKER_00: There is no it there's just shades of grey.
• 1:29:31
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's it's all too it's all too complicated in that regard.
• 1:29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And what I think people expected Basbol to do was to be like, right, well, this is how we're gonna play cricket forever, and this is the new way of doing things.
• 1:29:42
  SPEAKER_00: What if it was to change something?
• 1:29:44
  SPEAKER_00: A bit like when you um Jonah Lomu arrived.
• 1:29:49
  SPEAKER_00: That wasn't there will always be a winger that's twice the size of everybody else now, and that's what everyone's gonna do.
• 1:29:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was like, no, no, no, you can shift a paradigm of how you think about something, there'll be some reactions and it'll evolve and things will move on.
• 1:30:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's all it was, I think.
• 1:30:03
  SPEAKER_00: It was a step-changing cricket to be more adventurous.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was a reaction to the fact that what talent did he have to work with?
• 1:30:09
  SPEAKER_00: He had talent that was predominantly white ball cricket-based because we'd spent 10 years trying to rebuild that after being terrible at it.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Play with the resources you've got, and he got some good results out of it, but people then expected that to be the way you did everything moving forward.
• 1:30:21
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:30:22
  SPEAKER_01: I I think it's interesting because you would, and maybe there's an interesting thesis in this, but you compare Basbol with Steve Bolfick when he took out Wing Blue.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_00: Just doing the same thing in my head.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: Love it, go on, go on, go it.
• 1:30:33
  SPEAKER_01: So one is let's go super shacking, the other is let's go super defensive, and both were hated.
• 1:30:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't I I would be interested in Bas in doing it.
• 1:30:43
  SPEAKER_00: You had a champagne period of a couple of years where it was like, oh no, this is great.
• 1:30:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, yeah.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be really interested in knowing if anyone was ever collecting any data on like what people sentiment analysis, yeah, but it's out there, yeah.
• 1:30:55
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you do you know what you could retrospectively do it now?
• 1:30:57
  SPEAKER_00: You could scrape X for a sentiment basis of it, and we must come on to AI's impact on this in a minute.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_00: But um, but and then both we would say it because it was like, well, this is so dull.
• 1:31:07
  SPEAKER_01: This is like really born.
• 1:31:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:31:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I think it's I think what's what I find very bleak about that is that what pi what people want, despite what they might say, is from the the response to both of those is more of the same.
• 1:31:27
  SPEAKER_01: They don't actually want differences, they don't want change, and they don't want people to think outside the box, they want more of the same of what what they're kind of getting.
• 1:31:37
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that is a bit of a do you think there's a graph that if you get success, it's fine.
• 1:31:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't want you to change, don't want you to change.
• 1:31:46
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, you're winning some games.
• 1:31:47
  SPEAKER_00: All right, you win some oh you've won a trophy.
• 1:31:49
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, we're fine.
• 1:31:50
  SPEAKER_00: In fact, actually, no, that's not true because you even look at the clubs like who win an FA Cup or something out of nowhere, they still fire the manager a year later.
• 1:31:57
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:31:58
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, it doesn't buy you their enough goodwill anymore.
• 1:32:00
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't.
• 1:32:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I I'd be interested because you know, Bulfwick took England to the it almost beat South Africa in the semi-final of 2023.
• 1:32:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the only team we got really aimed at.
• 1:32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Which if you'd estimate like probably on form, they shouldn't have got out of the group.
• 1:32:16
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so it was a hell of an achievement from a coaching perspective.
• 1:32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, and you would you know I remember kind of speaking to people who were like, yeah, but that's what he should have done because he should have beating Argentina, he should have beaten Fiji, he should have beating whoever I can remember.
• 1:32:32
  SPEAKER_00: Because so we don't have the talent base we should have for the field of people we get to pull from in terms of rugby, probably because the majority of even the before the bigger athletes wouldn't have played football, they'd just come across a rugby, but even some of the footballers are getting huge people now, so he's not responsible for talent generation at every level across, and the international coach is dealing with so what um there was a line about Eddie Jones succeeding massively with the squad that Stuart Lancaster had actually built.
• 1:33:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, because like Atojay came through, but Lancaster had been supporting Atojay's development from when he had the youth set up in like the under-15s or whatever.
• 1:33:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, so there is a tale to that, right?
• 1:33:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, you see, see it as well with Wales, where um Wayne Pivak, who'd done really well with Scarlet's, took over Wales, which had done well with Gat Gatland.
• 1:33:25
  SPEAKER_01: Gatling went at the right time, didn't he?
• 1:33:27
  SPEAKER_01: He went exactly at the right time.
• 1:33:29
  SPEAKER_01: He should not have come back, I think, is is what is you should never go back, Real Madrid never go back.
• 1:33:33
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting, Mourinho going back to Real Madrid.
• 1:33:35
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, who turns down Madrid, but yeah, yeah.
• 1:33:38
  SPEAKER_01: I I think I think there's that interesting what I think fundamentally there's an interesting quote uh or interesting uh question to be had about well, what does a coach what are what do they offer, you know, because is is Gatland the beneficiary of an amazing um quality of player that he is not solely or even largely responsible for?
• 1:34:03
  SPEAKER_01: So Jamie Roberts, you know, he would have come through the Cardiff Academy, come through the cardio system with with basically no um uh interaction with Gatland.
• 1:34:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um Jonathan Davis, same thing.
• 1:34:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Ken Owings through the Scarlets, you know, basically everyone will have got to a very good level before Gatland got hang on them.
• 1:34:24
  SPEAKER_01: Was he a wasp before Wales?
• 1:34:26
  SPEAKER_01: He was, so he was Island and Wasps, and then I think he went straight from wasps to whales, I think that's like yeah.
• 1:34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um but essentially, uh, and that's and I I love Gatland, so this is not a criticism of him, but you're saying and the near side play he brought was so different at the time.
• 1:34:41
  SPEAKER_00: Overload, overload, overload.
• 1:34:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but he had a transcendent.
• 1:34:46
  SPEAKER_00: You could argue he underachieved with Wales for the quality of talent.
• 1:34:49
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 1:34:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think that'd be a yeah, very valid um uh kind of point to make.
• 1:34:54
  SPEAKER_01: It's the same you would potentially make with.
• 1:34:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they had a squad, didn't they?
• 1:34:59
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Mike Phillips is Photel's Pete.
• 1:35:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, another great example of that was a second row playing scrum.
• 1:35:06
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, and just like that um was it 2000?
• 1:35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Which was the Australia tour where they won the series for the Lions?
• 1:35:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh that was 13, yeah.
• 1:35:16
  SPEAKER_00: 13.
• 1:35:17
  SPEAKER_00: That's the year we got married.
• 1:35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, babe.
• 1:35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Um Helen's Hendu was like the third test, so she was watching that as it was happening.
• 1:35:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um that I just remember that that tour was was awesome.
• 1:35:28
  SPEAKER_00: But Mike Phillips was playing Scrum Half in a way no one had before.
• 1:35:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 1:35:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I think and he'd have been a bang average second row.
• 1:35:36
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:35:38
  SPEAKER_00: So I love the idea of using people in a skill set and putting them somewhere different.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:35:44
  SPEAKER_00: Um, like for example, I talked about our amazing head of people.
• 1:35:47
  SPEAKER_00: He wasn't a HR person, he was a performance psychologist who'd coaxed every sport going.
• 1:35:51
  SPEAKER_00: We made him a HR person because it's a bit like taking the incredible athlete and putting them at number two, and all of a sudden it's like, oh my god, they're the best athlete at two.
• 1:35:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um Tom Young's.
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:36:00
  SPEAKER_00: So when you did that, same Tito Hooker.
• 1:36:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:36:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because he was like, he was good as a centre, but put him as a hooker and he was transformative for a couple of years.
• 1:36:07
  SPEAKER_01: And same with um oh god, what's his name?
• 1:36:10
  SPEAKER_01: Uh the Bristol tiny little hooker for Bristol.
• 1:36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I can't remember what his name is, yeah.
• 1:36:16
  SPEAKER_01: He's I love it.
• 1:36:17
  SPEAKER_00: I just um my man crush was um Dmitry Zarzewski when he came out for France.
• 1:36:22
  SPEAKER_00: He was like, You've got a bodybuilder playing number two with like log hair.
• 1:36:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is ridiculous.
• 1:36:26
  SPEAKER_00: I met him about no you didn't, yeah.
• 1:36:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I met him at lasting about five years.
• 1:36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Very much so.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, very much so.
• 1:36:32
  SPEAKER_01: He was doing his uh he was doing because to coach in France, you have to have French qualification, like French coaching qualifications.
• 1:36:38
  SPEAKER_01: So he was off to basically like a school hall with a bunch of you know dads who want to coach their kids to get his level one or two or whatever it was, because he I think he only retired maybe two or three years before and he was just starting his coaching journey.
• 1:36:53
  SPEAKER_01: But um, I quite like the idea of going to your local club uh to start off your coaching journey, and Svarzewski is there.
• 1:37:00
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, on the on that point of like what is the value of a coach?
• 1:37:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um it it is impossible to untangle the fact that Gatland got a much better deal out of his players um than Pivak did.
• 1:37:13
  SPEAKER_01: Um now obviously Gatland will go down and likely will go down as possibly Wales's best ever coach, uh, or certainly for for the moment, but you know how what would have happened if Pivak would have been given the team at Gatland key?
• 1:37:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we'll never know.
• 1:37:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, look at Andy Farrell.
• 1:37:30
  SPEAKER_00: If if he'd have gone to England when he went to Ireland, he wouldn't have been as successful.
• 1:37:33
  SPEAKER_00: No, exactly.
• 1:37:36
  SPEAKER_00: Now, is that also true of league sport rather than international?
• 1:37:41
  SPEAKER_00: Because so if you take American football, for an example, you you can pretty much change half the roster in a season.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:37:50
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas internationally, you can't.
• 1:37:52
  SPEAKER_00: You've got a pool of players that I wonder what percent changes on an age basis.
• 1:37:57
  SPEAKER_00: Five, ten?
• 1:37:58
  SPEAKER_00: May yeah, being a good thing.
• 1:37:59
  SPEAKER_00: It's pretty small coming through, isn't it?
• 1:38:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um even in even in soccer football and cricket, you can't change that many.
• 1:38:07
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:38:07
  SPEAKER_00: And it's even harder in business if you think about it.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:38:10
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's quite difficult.
• 1:38:11
  SPEAKER_00: You you there's no way to trade a player away.
• 1:38:14
  SPEAKER_00: So in the NFL, you get to a point of a player being too expensive at the end of their contract, someone else pays them it and they go.
• 1:38:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, you can't do that in business.
• 1:38:21
  SPEAKER_00: If you've got a director that's got too expensive, it's not easy to trade them to your competitor.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:38:26
  SPEAKER_00: So it ends up becoming quite difficult in terms of that.
• 1:38:28
  SPEAKER_00: So actually, I think almost running a business is more akin to managing an international team.
• 1:38:33
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's true.
• 1:38:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's slow to slow to change um the fundamental um building blocks of who you've got on that team.
• 1:38:41
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think you can do a lot of like cultural change and that kind of even that, you know, you can do the headline stuff, but the actual the actual change will take a while.
• 1:38:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but yeah, I think at a club level, you assuming you've got the responsibility to to change your personnel, I think you have a lot more fingerprints on both success and failure.
• 1:39:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I also think you've just got more time, you've got more time.
• 1:39:05
  SPEAKER_01: So, like you see it with Tuchel, where how much time does he have?
• 1:39:10
  SPEAKER_01: He can't bring in something that is the same as what you might have done at Chelsea.
• 1:39:15
  SPEAKER_01: So he's always going to be playing in a style which is not quite what he wants, which is a bit of a simplification of what he wants, which again then leads to the question of well, you know, uh you look for those those moments, so you look for his how he managed that second half of the Argentina game, and you go, Well, that might just be one data point, but that's the most clear case we have of his kind of poor ability.
• 1:39:43
  SPEAKER_00: In the NFL they call it they call it the toxic differential, which is the amount of turnovers you produce versus that you win.
• 1:39:49
  SPEAKER_00: So if you throw interceptions more than and literally it's almost like perfect linear between whoever has the least turnovers wins, other than the occasional outlier.
• 1:39:58
  SPEAKER_00: I think in business as well as sport, you can have a performance or an act that's so bad that it outweighs all the good.
• 1:40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that the next like the result for England was a successful World Cup.
• 1:40:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:11
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's best since '66.
• 1:40:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:14
  SPEAKER_00: However, the sentiment about that second half was such that it was a failure overall.
• 1:40:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:40:20
  SPEAKER_00: He's not going to last a year, is he?
• 1:40:21
  SPEAKER_01: I wouldn't have thought so, but it's just difficult to say, isn't it?
• 1:40:24
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's exactly the same as Borthwick.
• 1:40:27
  SPEAKER_01: He achieved what is a reasonable pre-tournament expectation.
• 1:40:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh exceeded.
• 1:40:33
  SPEAKER_01: Exceeded, yeah.
• 1:40:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but the w the manner of the defeat was such that it it's hard.
• 1:40:40
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think this is so difficult.
• 1:40:42
  SPEAKER_01: And you see this in in business a lot, where, like you say, it's possible to be really bad, but even if you're amazing, the margin you're adding might be not not significantly more than someone who's just quite good.
• 1:40:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that there's an element of that where you look at you look at Borthwick and you say, I just want to have an alternative universe where I put in, I don't know, whoever finished, whoever was coaching, you know, Newcastle at the time, and what would have been the difference?
• 1:41:11
  SPEAKER_01: It would there be any difference?
• 1:41:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um we're not a million miles away from being able to simulate that then.
• 1:41:17
  SPEAKER_00: So um were you uh a championship manager guy as a kid?
• 1:41:20
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, very much so, yeah.
• 1:41:21
  SPEAKER_00: So um my entire so I've got a PhD in data analytics because of champship management.
• 1:41:27
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, literally the obsession of playing with that, and like the the backbone of our business is we've got this proprietary algorithm.
• 1:41:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh she's actually called Claudia.
• 1:41:36
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 1:41:36
  SPEAKER_00: We invented her before Claude existed, so we can prove that, and Anthropoc are fine with it, because I've talked to them about it.
• 1:41:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um it scans every square meter of the UK and values land for what we would uniquely do with it versus what the market would view, so it's money ball for the environment.
• 1:41:51
  SPEAKER_00: So we we've had this five years plus, but it but it starts from championship manager and moving things around on a screen in terms of terms of the numerical way you'd you'd look at stuff.
• 1:42:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um one of the things that has always struck me in that equation, you remember when you'd you'd make a new signing and you'd have to um you could maybe afford one massive signing there.
• 1:42:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen it play out whereby that marquee signing leads to success on the pitch?
• 1:42:16
  SPEAKER_00: So like is Henry Paulett worth paying that million?
• 1:42:20
  SPEAKER_01: I I would well I actually just this morning published a substack on this where I argue he's not.
• 1:42:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um so if you so there's a bunch of stats that go into this kind of thing, but um the problem with Loveby in the in the Prem, which is different to football, is that there's basically no value in being successful um to a certain point.
• 1:42:41
  SPEAKER_01: So if you go from like sixth to fifth, fifth, you're not in the playoffs and you're not you're not more in Europe, you're just in Europe as well.
• 1:42:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is the prize money significantly different?
• 1:42:51
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's there's no difference in whenever you're finishing prize money.
• 1:42:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:42:55
  SPEAKER_01: What does change is if you get home semi-final, you get half a million, maybe, uh, for that.
• 1:43:00
  SPEAKER_00: So that's for first and second place.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:43:03
  SPEAKER_01: So like going from fifth to fourth, you you won't get any of that money, but you could you get a I think you get some of the final cash if you made the final.
• 1:43:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you would also you could certainly claim some more from sponsors, and you know, there's that kind of stuff, and maybe a bumping attendance next season.
• 1:43:19
  SPEAKER_01: So there's like slightly more intangible benefits, but obviously in football, you could say, well, with this player we finished 10th, with this new player we finished eighth, and that is a gap of I don't know 30 million, and you cost us 10 million, therefore 20 million up.
• 1:43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um so with with Pollock, it if you're to make the case that with him they are so much better than without him, um, that he's worth a million, um you would you'd have to say, well, they wouldn't have finished in the playoffs, um, and they wouldn't have reached the latter stages of Europe.
• 1:43:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I would estimate or calculate those two to be worth about 1.1 million.
• 1:43:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so if he's solely responsible for their improvement, then you you should pay him a million.
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_01: But that requirement would mean that uh they'd have to finish 10 points lower than they did because they were quite comfortably in the top two.
• 1:44:11
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so that would be about 14% of their total points whole.
• 1:44:15
  SPEAKER_01: So you'd have to make the claim that he would be worth 14% of their total haul.
• 1:44:21
  SPEAKER_00: Did you do the discounting as well as the players that wouldn't be on the field if they had paid him?
• 1:44:26
  SPEAKER_01: No, so that is so that would make it even yeah, even less likely.
• 1:44:29
  SPEAKER_01: But so like the 14% it it's just not possible for for you know, even in football where there's only 11 players, maybe you could get to it in like hockey where there's six or basketball.
• 1:44:42
  SPEAKER_01: But even at that point, if you're saying that one player is directly responsible for 14% of an outcome above other placement, it's just not possible.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it was maybe it was how to win the Premier League that they worked out that Messi was worth less than a goal a game.
• 1:45:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:45:01
  SPEAKER_00: I I think it and PhD have shown that, haven't they?
• 1:45:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, exactly.
• 1:45:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was the same.
• 1:45:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm not sure I'm gonna remember exactly what Ian Graham hug in there, but it was something like the best player in the Premier League is worth was it like six points or something across the whole season, which is like what's that?
• 1:45:19
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's maybe maybe five percent or seven percent or something.
• 1:45:23
  SPEAKER_01: So um I might I might be over the flaking those figures actually, but it it's not that big of a gap, and Pollock is not playing in a in a position which is so is that value.
• 1:45:35
  SPEAKER_00: Interesting.
• 1:45:36
  SPEAKER_00: Have you um in the NFL one year they did a ranking of the value of position?
• 1:45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:45:42
  SPEAKER_00: So they did it was the Eagles again.
• 1:45:44
  SPEAKER_00: They worked out that their backup quarterback was the 15th most important player on the field because they knew they'd play X number of games.
• 1:45:52
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:45:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they were the first, they broke the record for like how much you paid the backup because they're like, look, in 60% or 70% of seasons, they're gonna play a quarter of the season.
• 1:45:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_00: Have you run that in rugby?
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_01: Like, do we know objectively the fly half is the most valuable player or it's the tight head prop or yeah, so so not not specifically, but if you so I I know Oval have got a kind of um I think it's a points added or win probability added, um, and the you know, generally you will get the fly half centre, maybe a backflow occasionally we'll we'll have trump on the half, just based on touches.
• 1:46:28
  SPEAKER_01: Interestingly, scrum halves are the lowest paid on average in the premiership.
• 1:46:32
  SPEAKER_01: Are they really?
• 1:46:33
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so the the average pay, I think it's something like 90,000.
• 1:46:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but it's does your brain start screaming that's an opportunity?
• 1:46:43
  SPEAKER_00: To me, I'm like, brilliant, let's go get the best scrum half for half the price of the best fly half.
• 1:46:48
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it it it scream, I guess it screams the opportunity in two ways.
• 1:46:51
  SPEAKER_00: But what's the shape of the distribution of the average as well?
• 1:46:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is there a couple of outliers at either end, or is it generally normally yeah?
• 1:46:57
  SPEAKER_01: So I I should go.
• 1:46:58
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Geeky Stats part.
• 1:47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's i I I don't know on the specifics of of how that would be framed, but I guess the two opportunities are you pay a bit more for someone who's a lot better.
• 1:47:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, or you go the unit cost of difference is much lower than paying for a prop.
• 1:47:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:47:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:47:16
  SPEAKER_01: Or you go, maybe it doesn't matter, we'll just pick someone who's pretty good who plays in the champ, and we will, you know, if they're pay not pay that.
• 1:47:24
  SPEAKER_00: That screams of who is the player in the champ that's mid-20s has regularly performed well, and you get them at steel.
• 1:47:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's actually, so there's a guy, I can't remember what his name is, maybe it's Mike Austin, I think it's about I think that might be him.
• 1:47:39
  SPEAKER_01: Um he came to Gloucester from Hartbury, and uh so Hartbury are playing the champ, the kind of a Fiji team to Gloucester.
• 1:47:45
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and uh he had played something like maybe 85 games in three seasons at Hartbury.
• 1:47:53
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and he was still quite young, he wasn't super young, but he was maybe 26 or so.
• 1:47:57
  SPEAKER_01: And I rated him as one of the best signings of last season.
• 1:47:59
  SPEAKER_01: Now he he went to Gloucester and he was uh he played a lot of games, but mostly as a backup.
• 1:48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but I I looked at him and went, I would 100% sign that guy over someone who's four years younger who might have played six premiership, you know, or like premiership cup or whatever it might be appearances.
• 1:48:18
  SPEAKER_01: Because in Mike Austin's case, you know more or less exactly what he's going to deliver.
• 1:48:23
  SPEAKER_01: He's produced it time after you.
• 1:48:25
  SPEAKER_00: Your error bar on what you're getting is so tight.
• 1:48:27
  SPEAKER_00: Fairly low.
• 1:48:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:48:28
  SPEAKER_01: And if you're picking up a um a backup or third choice scrum half, that's who you want.
• 1:48:34
  SPEAKER_01: You don't want this guy who could come in and yet in very few percentage times will be Antoine Dupont, but mostly time will be not very good.
• 1:48:44
  SPEAKER_01: You want someone who has produced even at a lower level, time after time after time after time, and he will now come to the higher level, and his ceiling is going to be lower because it's very unlikely that he is now suddenly going to turn into this amazing player, but it's also very unlikely he's going to completely flop.
• 1:49:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so if I was a team, I'd be looking at that for my scrum half scrum half, where I'd be going, you know, scrum half, there's a lot of scrum halves out there because it's a physically demanding position, you often get subbed off after an hour.
• 1:49:14
  SPEAKER_01: So even a backup scrum half who plays a whole season will be playing, will be pushing the kind of 800, 1000 minute mark.
• 1:49:22
  SPEAKER_01: At that point, you're there, the bars are getting yellow and yellow and yellow.
• 1:49:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so even if you're looking at someone who played, you know, someone who started every game and gnat won.
• 1:49:31
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if there is such a player, but I'm sure they will.
• 1:49:33
  SPEAKER_01: You'd look at him and go, what's the worst he could do at the prem?
• 1:49:36
  SPEAKER_01: Like, he's not gonna be terrible.
• 1:49:38
  SPEAKER_01: He can pass a ball, you know, he can get around the pitch, he can kick, he's gonna be, he's gonna be fine.
• 1:49:43
  SPEAKER_01: Like, he's gonna do a completely fine job, and I'll pay 35 grand for them.
• 1:49:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's I could pay double that.
• 1:49:50
  SPEAKER_01: What's the highest pay to come off in the premiership?
• 1:49:53
  SPEAKER_01: I would I don't know, but I would imagine it's probably uh Alex Mitchell or uh uh Northampton.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Or Ben, what's his name?
• 1:50:03
  SPEAKER_01: Bath.
• 1:50:03
  SPEAKER_01: Spencer.
• 1:50:04
  SPEAKER_01: Ben Spencer Bath.
• 1:50:06
  SPEAKER_01: Just both England players being there a while have a big impact.
• 1:50:11
  SPEAKER_01: But even actually, you look at Alex Alex Mitchell and the young guy, again, I can't remember.
• 1:50:17
  SPEAKER_01: If I'm just saying it's back up scum half, he came in because Mitchell was injured and he's being amazing.
• 1:50:22
  SPEAKER_00: It does um does it objectively make any value for a premiership side to have an England player?
• 1:50:28
  SPEAKER_00: Don't they just lose them for too much of the season?
• 1:50:30
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they do, yeah, but they get they do get a lot of benefits from it.
• 1:50:34
  SPEAKER_01: So they get um they get cash back uh for players and then they get cash back when the player's not there.
• 1:50:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I would Are they allowed to carry more players under the limited squad to accommodate for it?
• 1:50:49
  SPEAKER_01: So they they are allowed to um use the cash that a player so if a player's injured, even if they're not playing for England, if they're just injured for the whole season, you still have to pay them, but you don't have to count against the cat, and you can insure it right as well.
• 1:51:02
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, yeah.
• 1:51:03
  SPEAKER_01: So for an English player, there's slightly more benefits to that.
• 1:51:07
  SPEAKER_01: So like you you get covered, I believe this is true, you get covered for the game, the weeks that they're not there.
• 1:51:13
  SPEAKER_00: The um the insurance thing's really interesting.
• 1:51:16
  SPEAKER_00: So um I mentioned earlier my friend Lance Bradley was at Gloucester.
• 1:51:20
  SPEAKER_00: When when he went there, and he he comes from the automotive background and the Japanese style of manufacture, which is all stats-based, and they ran the number of injuries that they were having at Gloucester against every other team, etc.
• 1:51:34
  SPEAKER_00: around the world, and that's where they made the change to the 3D, uh 3G pitch that was there, and I know there's a lot of conversation about 3G now, but that immediately followed the season whereby they had the lowest number of injuries ever.
• 1:51:45
  SPEAKER_00: They had Cipriani and they had really good scrum half as well.
• 1:51:49
  SPEAKER_01: Simpson.
• 1:51:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they kidding it.
• 1:51:51
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they um yeah, I'm trying to think who they would find that back then.
• 1:51:55
  SPEAKER_01: Did they have Thomas Williams or was that later after May that they left?
• 1:51:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but they it was Cipriani's like he was desperately trying to get into the World Cup squad and things like that, and they came third in the premiership, I think.
• 1:52:05
  SPEAKER_00: But the thing they'd managed to do is they'd had no injuries all year.
• 1:52:08
  SPEAKER_00: So it's really interesting.
• 1:52:09
  SPEAKER_00: Have you run any stats on the impact of injuries and availability of players?
• 1:52:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so um that it goes two ways.
• 1:52:17
  SPEAKER_01: So you will have some teams who use very few players and are very successful because of it.
• 1:52:22
  SPEAKER_01: So, like the kind of the Leicester City, when was that 2013?
• 1:52:26
  SPEAKER_01: Was that 15?
• 1:52:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, where they only used like 11 players at the end of the day.
• 1:52:29
  SPEAKER_00: That was a freak season statistically, wasn't it?
• 1:52:32
  SPEAKER_00: Numbers on that's amazing.
• 1:52:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so you'll just Michael with the single best season a goalkeeper's ever had ever.
• 1:52:37
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah, and like Vardy with uh exceeding his expected goals and all this kind of thing, all just combined, but and everyone else falling off a cliff at the same time.
• 1:52:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was it was the but the bookies are rarely wrong, yeah.
• 1:52:48
  SPEAKER_00: Like it was 5,000 to one for a reason.
• 1:52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it's kind of it is it's sometimes best not to look into it because the romance of it was so beautiful, but the reality of it is but it's it's also true of every season, you know, Arsenal season.
• 1:53:02
  SPEAKER_01: Um you can look at the some stats that say, well, it was very fortunate, and everyone's if you win a cut that's your romance point's really interesting.
• 1:53:10
  SPEAKER_00: So I was thinking about this when you're talking about data.
• 1:53:12
  SPEAKER_00: The the people who think data and analytics is bad for the romance of sport, I think they're missing the point.
• 1:53:19
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think actually the better you get at the data, if everyone had the same data, the same analytics, and the same decision making, ultimately, it is that magic and romance that'll make the difference anyway.
• 1:53:31
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:53:32
  SPEAKER_00: It is that touch of genius, that spot of look, that weather, that factor that can't be considered that will make it.
• 1:53:38
  SPEAKER_00: So ultimately, you're not detracting from the stroke of genius, you're just giving that a place to operate anyway.
• 1:53:45
  SPEAKER_01: Totally agree.
• 1:53:45
  SPEAKER_01: I think I mean I I watch games.
• 1:53:48
  SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I've got no investment in the game, and I'll watch it as an interesting tactical, you know, case study of like, oh, this is interesting what's going on here, or I've always wanted to see that player play.
• 1:53:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'm interested to see what they do.
• 1:54:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but sometimes I'll watch Wales play and all that goes out the window.
• 1:54:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I I don't care if we get lucky, I don't care if um, you know, if if we shouldn't have won but did, I don't care what our 22 entry stat says and whether we should have uh we were just super fortunate to convert that many.
• 1:54:18
  SPEAKER_01: I just want them to win.
• 1:54:19
  SPEAKER_01: And I think most people, their experience of watching sport is as completely irrational beings, which is as it should be.
• 1:54:28
  SPEAKER_00: Like that's you know I was thinking about that fan that was speaking to Ian McGeeken, and I was thinking, it it's the fan's job to be annoyed.
• 1:54:36
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, that's what he's there to do.
• 1:54:38
  SPEAKER_00: He's paid his money or her money to go and be annoyed.
• 1:54:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and that's fine.
• 1:54:42
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly, and that's and you don't have to sit there and go, Oh, well, you know, I I want to be annoyed, but actually on 22 entries we should have beaten them, so um fair play, do you want a pint?
• 1:54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like it's not, yeah, as you say, it's not their job.
• 1:54:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I think for a lot of people, they go and watch that game, and when the stats come in, they go, I don't want this.
• 1:55:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I want to just be there and drink my pint and eat my chips, and I just want to let the game wash over me and just feel the feelings for it.
• 1:55:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say those two things are not in competition.
• 1:55:12
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, the stats are happening whether we collect them or not.
• 1:55:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, callies are happening, uh, dominant callies are happening, 20 train trees are happening, kicks are happening, whether someone is sat there on a computer or in it with an oat pad collecting that information.
• 1:55:25
  SPEAKER_01: The thing with the stats is exactly like you say, it then allows us to add an extra layer and actually quantify some of these beautiful performances that we're seeing and like awe-inspiring performances that we're seeing.
• 1:55:37
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, when people uh kind of see that, they do like it.
• 1:55:42
  SPEAKER_01: Like they like the fact that Johnny Gray made 32 tackles for Scotland or you know, um Chesland Colby carried for 200 metres or whatever.
• 1:55:49
  SPEAKER_01: They they like the fact that that's out there, and I think and I would feel the same if I felt it was getting to a point where the game was so predictable that and the stats have made it that way, that there was no point playing.
• 1:56:01
  SPEAKER_01: I think I don't want this.
• 1:56:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but we are so far off that, like we're not even we're not even an inch closer to this kind of malathon goal than we were 10 years ago.
• 1:56:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're we're so far off that point where we can predict everything.
• 1:56:18
  SPEAKER_00: Um this has been one of my favourite conversations.
• 1:56:22
  SPEAKER_00: I love it, man.
• 1:56:23
  SPEAKER_00: I'm such a geek for this stuff.
• 1:56:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's um and normal human beings get annoyed when you dive into this level of geekiness on stuff.
• 1:56:30
  SPEAKER_00: They're like, what are you talking about?
• 1:56:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but no, no, no, it's great, it's really exciting.
• 1:56:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um if we want to be excited about the evolution of the game, which which coaches, which teams, and they can be as off beaters, what should we be looking out for now?
• 1:56:42
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that we're in the airling hour where the coaches uh played the game professionally.
• 1:56:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um so the coaches had analysis, they had thoughtful coaches um coaching them, and so we're like two or three stages of the moves compounding, right?
• 1:57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:57:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so we're at the stage where those coaches, the idea of an analyst who hasn't necessarily put played the game, telling them what they think is not anathema, well, as it was 10 years ago.
• 1:57:14
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so you look at the likes of, and we saw this in the lines, I think we had that in the World Cup, where um Dan Bigger and Lenny Ogartha, both guys who finished playing relatively recently, bigger maybe just a couple of years, Ogartha, a few years back, um, Ogartha as coach in that time, both will have played more or less an entire career in what we would now consider completely professional environment.
• 1:57:37
  SPEAKER_01: And their insights were unbelievable.
• 1:57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Just the things that they see in the game, the way that they can describe what's happening, the way that they can describe how the game is is is evolving is unbelievable.
• 1:57:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's fascinating.
• 1:57:50
  SPEAKER_01: I think where we're seeing that now is some of those exciting coaches who are coming through.
• 1:57:55
  SPEAKER_01: So I would point to uh Sam Veste at Northampton Saints.
• 1:57:59
  SPEAKER_01: So he was a player, but he wasn't like I'm not sure if he even played for England, but yeah, he was a perfectly good player, but he's an exceptional coach.
• 1:58:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and we also point to Bristol Bears and Pat Lamb.
• 1:58:12
  SPEAKER_01: So Pat Lamb played in the amateur theatre, so he, for all intents and purposes, shouldn't be like this, but he is open-minded, and Bristol is an open-minded club, and they are willing to try new things.
• 1:58:23
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, like you see that just in their social media where they're so different to everything everyone else that's out there.
• 1:58:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and so they are willing to try new things, and that comes across in the game.
• 1:58:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so those kind of teams, you can watch them and you're seeing a different type of rugby, a type of rugby that didn't exist 10 years ago.
• 1:58:41
  SPEAKER_01: But you can also look at someone like Leicester Tigers and you can say Leicester Tigers are, you know, pulled up from the English rugby mugged, kind of this is how they play for 50, 60, 70 years, always the same shirts, always the same traditions.
• 1:58:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so they are the team who aren't doing something different to what they did 10 years ago, yet they to a certain extent they are because they're picking players, or they're not yes, they're picking players, they just have access now to players who are big lumps of forwards who can pass.
• 1:59:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think you're describing authenticity there.
• 1:59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:59:16
  SPEAKER_00: So it doesn't matter what your mould is, just be authentic to who you want to be as a team and have have some longevity to it.
• 1:59:22
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you try and do it in 10 minutes, it's it's not going to stick.
• 1:59:25
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 1:59:25
  SPEAKER_01: I I think they're creating those environments where for so long players are being naughty kids who you can't let them on the loose and you have to kind of keep them, you know, you you can't let them be creative, you have to just tell them what to do because you're the you're the coach, you know how it is, and they're not.
• 1:59:44
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas the fact is they'll be has to get to the point where players are allowed to do what they what they want on the pitch.
• 1:59:51
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you send them out there with a pre-ordained structure and you're playing against some more the uh intelligent coach or analysis team or doesn't survive first contact.
• 2:00:00
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 2:00:01
  SPEAKER_01: It just immediately falls apart.
• 2:00:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, England, Italy.
• 2:00:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:00:04
  SPEAKER_00: We're not engaging at the breakdown.
• 2:00:05
  SPEAKER_00: What the hell do we do then?
• 2:00:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:00:07
  SPEAKER_01: And you'd you'd look at those England players and you say, if you said to them that we're going to play a bunch of games today, I've I've often I've said this to to clubs where uh to like analysts or whatever, I'll say, I'll come in and we'll do a workshop where we'll split them up into like five five teams and I'll give them a completely ridiculous rule.
• 2:00:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'll say okay, the changing tomorrow, um, and you have to have five men in the scrum.
• 2:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: You can't have eight.
• 2:00:33
  SPEAKER_01: What do you do?
• 2:00:33
  SPEAKER_00: New Zealand do it, don't they?
• 2:00:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:00:35
  SPEAKER_00: They they literally run those both virtual sessions in terms of what happens if and and real ones.
• 2:00:40
  SPEAKER_00: But the best one I remember hearing about that is Michael Phelps before the Beijing games, his coach made him practice with his goggles coming off.
• 2:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 2:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: And when he dove in um at one of the finals, his goggles filled straight with water, and he explained he would go swim cat, goggles, swimcat.
• 2:00:57
  SPEAKER_00: So he couldn't even rip them off because they're they're pinned in place.
• 2:01:00
  SPEAKER_00: So he had to count his strokes for the wall turn because he couldn't see it.
• 2:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:01:03
  SPEAKER_00: So he was like 17 turns, 16 turns, and he won a gold medal, not been able to see.
• 2:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:01:07
  SPEAKER_00: But it was only because he practiced that ahead of time.
• 2:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: Do you know?
• 2:01:10
  SPEAKER_00: I haven't I've had it on my so I I'm I'm a data geek.
• 2:01:14
  SPEAKER_00: Uh I've had a to-do list for so our business is just over five years old.
• 2:01:17
  SPEAKER_00: I have every single action I've ever had in a single spreadsheet to do list.
• 2:01:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm at like 9,000 actions, right?
• 2:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: These are the things that aren't just stuff you do quickly, but long-term thoughts.
• 2:01:26
  SPEAKER_00: Like there's quotes from your book in there, there's tons of stuff.
• 2:01:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I've had them there, run this what if scenario with the exec committee, and I still haven't done it yet.
• 2:01:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 2:01:34
  SPEAKER_00: Because it it's finding the right mental mode and time to do it and those scenarios, but I think they're so valuable.
• 2:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: I've I think also like the the Phelps uh example, so I bet there's an element of that where it was like every day we leap in the pool, we swim, and it's getting a bit boring.
• 2:01:49
  SPEAKER_01: So let's do this thing.
• 2:01:51
  SPEAKER_01: Keep it real and you see that with Engling actually.
• 2:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: There were some examples, I think he got criticized for them, but I think they like surprise, surprise, he did something different.
• 2:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 2:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: I think they got into like sumo suits or something, or they absorbing.
• 2:02:04
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe it was that, yeah.
• 2:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, I bet Steve Borthwick hasn't gone, this is the best way to do it.
• 2:02:10
  SPEAKER_00: And they brought some mixed martial artists as well, didn't they, for the breakdown.
• 2:02:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 2:02:14
  SPEAKER_01: And they they've done stuff with like big, uh kind of fake um uh you know, like the free kick walls that you have to kick over in in in football, but they brought them into a kind of practice passing.
• 2:02:25
  SPEAKER_01: They all get criticized for this kind of stuff.
• 2:02:26
  SPEAKER_01: But I bet Steve Borthwick hasn't gone.
• 2:02:29
  SPEAKER_01: We need to get into a Zorb to get better at Lugby.
• 2:02:32
  SPEAKER_01: I bet what he's done is I have these guys for four weeks and it's the third week, and we're getting bored and tired of each other, and there's only so much Lugby we can do.
• 2:02:41
  SPEAKER_01: So, what we're gonna do is gonna get in some Zorbs and we're gonna change up, you know.
• 2:02:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you look at um the the sort of most advanced tech campuses around the world.
• 2:02:50
  SPEAKER_00: So Google put in when they first started scaling up really high-level free cafeterias for everyone.
• 2:02:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's not a gesture of generosity.
• 2:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: That is we want you to be in the building more than you're not.
• 2:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they they put in sleep pods, they put in various different things to try and keep you in the building, to keep you engaged, to keep you entertained, to keep doing stuff for you so that you were doing more work.
• 2:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's however you can enhance it.
• 2:03:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's even like um when you get animals in zoos, not that I'm pro zoo, but they they feed them in different ways to enrich them to keep the mind going in that.
• 2:03:19
  SPEAKER_00: So um the Google analogy was the coffee machine one.
• 2:03:23
  SPEAKER_00: They said their best investment was high-quality coffee bars because it made people come together at the coffee station.
• 2:03:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and you you see that online stores now, right?
• 2:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Someone stepped into barista mode and they effectively get the coffee shop.
• 2:03:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's like that is like why are we playing so much golf?
• 2:03:38
  SPEAKER_01: We should do more cricket.
• 2:03:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you're thinking, you can't play cricket for 10 hours on your best days and then go and play for 10 hours.
• 2:03:45
  SPEAKER_00: Didn't help when um Burstow snapped his ankle in half, did it?
• 2:03:48
  SPEAKER_01: No, no, those things will yeah, and they're the playing the like the football before the game and the warm-up and that kind of thing.
• 2:03:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is someone got injured doing that, didn't they?
• 2:03:55
  SPEAKER_00: But but um Glenn McGrath stood in a cricket ball once, didn't he?
• 2:03:58
  SPEAKER_00: Turn his ankle and we won some ashes because of it.
• 2:04:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the greatest ashes of all time.
• 2:04:02
  SPEAKER_00: It was, yeah, it was astonishing.
• 2:04:03
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Sam, that has been probably the most treat of a podcast for me.
• 2:04:08
  SPEAKER_00: I think we could do ten more of those.
• 2:04:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um, your book is astonishing.
• 2:04:12
  SPEAKER_00: We'll we'll link that below.
• 2:04:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you so much for coming in.
• 2:04:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've adored every minute.
• 2:04:16
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, thank you very much for me.
• 2:04:17
  SPEAKER_01: It's been a big delight.