Playr down
I’m ignoring the app and giving myself a big pat on the back. In the first half I stayed almost exclusively in the opposition half – we were on top, were 2-0 up at half-time, and I stay up when we defend corners – but in the second half I dropped off a lot more – we conceded quite early and were under the cosh a lot until scoring late on. I’m an amateur footballer, playing on a Saturday morning, and I can see my heat map. I actually cover almost as much ground in the second half as the first.Ī third screen shows my heat map. It’s maybe a tad concerning that my most active five minutes was 5-10, but the bar chart doesn’t actually look too bad. I’m happy with that.Ĭleverly, the app also breaks down my distance into five-minute segments to show my most active periods and when I tired.
#Playr down professional#
It turns out I covered 8.04km, which the app informs me is well above the 7.43km ‘community’ average but some way short of the 10km the average professional centre-forward covers in a game. This isn’t doing my confidence much good. Was that the plan?’ You what, mate? I’m knackered! ‘Looks like you took that game pretty easy.
The team is doing well, I’ve worked hard and I’ve contributed. I gave about as much as I possibly could. I didn’t score, but I did get two assists and, for the first time in years, I got cramp. We won this game too, 3-1 against a team that had won their first two, making it seven points out of nine for us. I’ve been our top scorer for the last three years and I’d scored two goals in the first two games of this season going into this little experiment so I was feeling pretty good. I blame the booze.īut I’ve been playing every Saturday morning for six seasons now, originally as a centre-back but more recently as a centre-forward. I’m 33, and though at 6ft 3in and 13 stone I may look a bit like a footballer, it’s fair to say I’m lagging behind a bit in the fitness stakes. Stupidly, I decided to wear one of these vests in my Saturday morning league and compare my results to the professionals… The gameįirst of all, some background mitigation. Produced by Catapult, who provide vests to clubs including Chelsea, Tottenham, Bayern Munich and PSG, the £199 PLAYR system incorporates a vest, a small SmartPod which is placed into the vest and fits comfortably between the shoulder blades, and a charging dock. The GPS vests undoubtedly represent one of football’s greatest technological advances of recent times, and now they’re available for amateur footballers to buy, too. This kind of physical tracking data has long been collected by companies such as Prozone, while a more recent development has seen clubs using GPS vests to track their players’ workload and intensity in training, too.Īnd in 2015, the International Football Association Board approved the use of wearable tracking devices during games, allowing clubs to see in real time who is putting the effort in – and who isn’t. With clubs able to see how much distance players cover in a game, what speeds they reach and how often they break into a sprint over the 90 minutes, they simply can’t get away with taking it easy. If they do, they won’t stay in the team for long. And as much as we kid ourselves otherwise at times, footballers get through a lot of work. The only trouble is, while we might score the tap-in or make the easy pass, there’d be another 89 minutes to worry about. Whether it’s a striker missing an easy chance, a midfielder misplacing a five-yard pass or a defender mistiming a tackle in the penalty area, sometimes the pros make mistakes so basic that we can’t help but wonder if it should be us out there. No matter what level of football you watch, there’s bound to be at least one moment every weekend when you’re sure you could do better.