JC O'Shea: The man crunching Kerry football's numbers

By John Harrington

When JC O’Shea purchased his first video camera in 2009, it wasn’t long before his local GAA Club, Dr. Crokes Killarney, came knocking on his door.

They asked him to film a match for them, and things quickly escalated from there.

O’Shea’s match videos were such a big hit that he ended up live-streaming the 2009 County Final against South Kerry, a broadcast that clocked up 20,000 viewers.

Dr. Crokes were the first club to ever do so, and O’Shea received the 2009 GAA MacNamee Best Technology Innovation Award for his efforts.

From there, he quickly established himself as one of the most prolific Performance Analysts in Gaelic Games.

“I was working way with my club and just doing matches and managers then started getting a bit more selective,” he recalls now.

“They’d ask can you pick out all of our kick-outs? Our throw-ins? It was a bit of a slog going through six or seven videos and finding the moments and picking them out and putting them together.

“Because it was such a chore I ended up writing my own bit of software for picking out clips and doing analysis on it that way. That was all around 2010, 2011, 2012.

“Around 2012 then I got a call from Mickey Ned O'Sullivan who was involved with the Kerry minors. They were looking for someone to record their matches. So I've been involved with the Kerry minors every year since, and the Kerry U-20s too.

“I've been working on and off too with the Kerry senior team, depending on the manager. I've been with the Kerry senior team unbroken since 2019. So trying to juggle all three of those as well as my own club isn't easy.

“I do more than just film. I film the games and I'd have multiple cameras on the game. A zoomed in camera, a wide camera, wide cameras behind the goals.

“I have my own philosophy on the performance analysis stuff. For me it should all be aimed at what the players want out of it. For me it's all about decision-making.

“How can you change a player's decision making? How can you arm them to be better prepared for the match? There's no point just the manager knowing everything about the opposition, it's got to be the players too.”

O’Shea must be a good Performance Analyst, because he’s very much in demand.

As well as working with the Kerry minors, U-20s, and seniors, he also did performance analysis this year for five of the eight teams that contested the Kerry Senior Football Championship.

He also leases out his Performance Analysis software to other GAA clubs through his business, SidelineEye, and combines all of this with running his family pub, Jack C’s Bar In Killarney.

Time management is everything when you’re that busy, and O’Shea has refined a work-flow that sees him code a match live on his phone at the same time as he’s filming it, thereby saving himself two hours work that evening.

The software he has produced has made his life a lot easier, but Performance Analysis is still very much a laborious process regardless of the technology you have at your disposal.

“Even at Premiership level, you see at the Opta Stats, that's 30 guys in a warehouse watching a match from different camera angles and pressing tap, tap, tap on the phone," says O'Shea. "There is no fully automated stuff at the moment.

“It's very time-consuming work and my time is precious so I try to get as much as I can done in as little amount of time as possible.

“It saves me two hours if I code the game while I'm filming it. I can then get my clips out of it that way. And I can get live stats down to the sideline.

“As I'm coding and clipping up in the stand during the game, the boys have an app on the sideline, a dashboard, of those results coming in to them. So they can see our kick-out retention, our last three kick-outs, et cetera. There's only so much you can code and it's important not to bite off more than you can chew.

“The technology has come a long way, but, at the end of the day, Performance Analysis is still all about what you give to the players and how you deliver it. My mantra was that I didn't want to be the one presenting to the players. I can't tell the players what the manager wants. If I can make it easier for the manager to draw conclusions, that's what I want to do.

“My software allows the manager to watch a game and rewind it 10 seconds, type in a note, and when he wants to play it back to the players in a meeting he just has to press a button and it will play the moment he wants to isolate from different camera angles and help him get his point across.

“A lot of Performance Analysts can over-complicate it and produce reams of stats. I think it's just about keeping it simple and keeping it player-focused.”

One of the interesting things about the Performance Analysis community in Ireland is that it’s such a collaborative one.

Inter-county team Performance Analysts share video footage with one another on a WhatsApp group where advice on best practice is always given freely.

There will also be a great cross-pollination of ideas this weekend at the annual PA Community of Practice Day this Saturday in SETU Carlow where O’Shea will be one of the speakers.

Every Performance Analyst has their own methodology and ideas about how to best do the job. O’Shea likes to interpret the numbers rather than simply collate them.

“I always differentiate between the raw numbers. I would consider myself more of an analyst than a coder tip-tapping away,” he says.

“Usually I'm asked at half-time, tell me three things I don't know. Tell me three key stats that I can tell to the players. So, things like our kick-out retention. Or our shooting efficiency is 80 per cent but we've only had five shots at the posts. The important stuff.

“My degree is in Chemistry and you have two types of analysis in Chemistry. You have quantitative and qualitative. Quantitative is counting how much of something is there, and quantitative is telling you what is there. I think there's far too much counting going on and not enough interpretation.

“Fortunately enough the best managers have been open and willing to learn. All I ever hear from Jack O'Connor is, 'What do you think?' I'm always surprised because this guy has won four senior All-Irelands as manager and he's still asking me for my view. But, he does.

“He's always open to learning and I suppose you might always get a useful nugget of information from someone regardless of what you already know. The best managers listen to all views and then make up their own minds.”

So, what exactly is an average day like for O’Shea when he’s on duty with the Kerry senior footballers?

“I usually come to the ground two hours early,” he says. “At inter-county level is there's a fantastic PA Whatsapp group. I'll usually touch base with whoever is with the opposition county in the week before the game and it's very open. Where is the best place to film from, how to get permission sorted for whoever is playing away from home. We get all that stuff sorted.

“I'll show up at the ground and then usually over to the outside broadcast unit and set up our capture gear over there. So if they have multiple cameras we can two or three feeds off them.

“After that then it's a case then of finding my sport in the stand or wherever we're filming from and after that it's just a case of going down to mingle and give the guys a hand unloading the backroom van with all the stuff in it.

“On match-day then it's about sending on the links to the manager so they can get stats done on the sideline. Depending on the venue then, some of the coaches might be beside me.

“They're watching the game and are miked up to the sideline and I'll be filming the game and will have an instant replay of the game beside me. So as the passage of play goes on they can put their eyes down and see the last 12 or 15 seconds of play.

“Then at half-time it's a case of picking out your key stats and sending them on and then take a break and do the same for the second-half.”

Away from match days, O’Shea is constantly pulling together footage that can be used by Jack O’Connor for challenges that might lie ahead.

He’ll watch every single National League match in a season, always keeping an eye out for players that Kerry might have to place a particular focus on in the championship.

So, for example, if Kerry play Dublin in the latter stages of the championship this year, O’Shea will have a video ready to go of every significant action that Con O’Callaghan has been a part of on the pitch for Dublin over the course of the season that he’ll be able to present to the Kerry defence.

He must clock up a huge amount of hours in front of his laptop in an average week, but O’Shea isn’t complaining.

Days like last year’s All-Ireland Final win make everything worthwhile, particularly as he has worked with most of these Kerry players since they were teenagers so has an intimate knowledge of the journey they’ve all been together.

“Absolutely,” says O’Shea. “I've seen a lot of these lads since they were in schools, I do a lot with the local secondary school here, St. Brendan's College. It's known as 'The Sem', and it's a real football academy.

“I filmed David Clifford playing with the school and playing with the development squads since he was U-15. He played a Hogan Cup in 2017. I've seen them all come through and I’d regard the role as a privilege.

“I’ve seen my club win an All-Ireland title form the best seats in Croke Park and it’s nice to be able to give something back off the field

“We're there to facilitate managers and communicate with the players though video and stats. At the end of the day it's a quiet backroom role but there are lots of bits of satisfaction out of it.

“I wouldn’t say we’re game-changers. We're just there to provide the extra few inches that might change the game.”

The GAA Performance Analysis Community of Practice Day is taking place in SETU Carlow on Saturday November 19th 2022 from 10am start to 3pm. There is a reduced rate for GAA accredited analysts who wish to attend.

Details and registration information here: https://eventgen.ie/gaa-performance-analysis-seminar-2022

You can view and download the Gaelic Games Performance Analysis Guide for Good Practice below.