Smartball has revolutionised data in rugby and refereeing could be next | Gavin Willacy

Smartball has revolutionised data in rugby and refereeing could be next | Gavin Willacy

While Twickenham debated why England can’t hold on to a lead at home and whether the southern hemisphere is pulling away from the north in rugby union now as well as league, those watching the Autumn Nations Series on TV saw a new toy being played with.

Viewers as well as match officials, broadcasters and coaches could now see exactly how much spin was on a pass, how high a kick went and how much it was spiralling. But however impressive the smartball technology, two of rugby’s thorniest questions – did that pass go forward? And did the player ground the ball for a try? – remain unsolved.

A rechargeable microchip that detects the smartball’s movement was developed by Sportable and presented by Sage in partnership with the ball manufacturers Gilbert and its sister company Steeden in rugby league. Despite it being used by the biggest competitions in both codes, it was previously kept on the tablets of analysts in the coaches’ booths. Now we can all see it.

“It starts with the broadcast that Sage are presenting, basically interesting stats,” explains Raphael Brandon, director of performance of science at Sportable. “As soon as something triggers over a threshold, the Snapstat feature automatically and instantly goes to the broadcaster and doesn’t require any editorial control. And because it’s not a camera system – it’s ultra wideband, mesh network – it’s clocking up the passes and kicks as they happen, so the stats are in real time or a millionth of a second behind.”

This is the layman’s version of a complex science. “There’s AI doing ball path detection so we can tell when the ball’s in hand and when it’s in the air: so there’s a pass flight and kick flight. As soon as a kick goes in, we can provide the graphics of how high it’s gone, the revolutions on the ball, the speed. The data should inform what the pundits and commentators are saying about style of play. It adds objectivity and augments their feedback.”

The referee Ben O’Keeffe (right) during a television review at Twickenham on Saturday. Photograph: Andrew Boyers/Action Images/Reuters

Unsurprisingly, the technology has appealed most to kickers. “The players that kick the most are looking at the spin, spiral or speed to see which are the most effective technique,” says Brandon. “So there’s a lot of focus on scrum-halves and their box-kicking, looking at the regainable kicks, whether their hang time makes it contestable or not. It’s knowing what the best players are doing and adding objectivity to the expert opinion. You didn’t use to know if it’s 3.9 or 4.1 seconds hang time, it was just four seconds in the air, but that makes a difference to a skill player. We can generate a dataset so coaches can have targets and use these in training and to guide selection.”

Trials have been ongoing at NRL clubs to see whether the new technology can also prove forward passes, if the ball has been grounded in-goal, and where exactly the ball goes out of play. Sportable believes it has nailed the latter, enabling accurate decisions in 50.22sec in union, 40.20sec in league.

“We have a lot of officiating options sitting behind the scenes, waiting for World Rugby or Six Nations to deploy them, including forward passes, and we’ve been trialling lineout locations – as in where the ball goes out,” says Brandon. “Our analysis showed the touch judges’ errors were pretty random – it’s not always short or always long – so I think teams would be in favour of bringing that in.”

But given the most important moment of every match is whether a try has actually been scored, and forward passes are a constant source of irritation, fans could be frustrated that they are not being resolved. Yet. While union referees can ask the television match official for help and go to big-screen replays to adjudicate on forward passes, NRL and Super League referees are not allowed to consult the pictures and must rely on their touch judges to make on-the-spot decisions with the naked eye. The argument is that camera angles are misleading and are very rarely exactly in line with a pass or catch, making video evidence unreliable.

The technology used to see if a union lineout is thrown straight, something far less contentious as it’s from a stationary point right in front of the touch judge, is similar for detecting forward passes, but it needs to be infallible. “It’s about taking away the initial forward velocity of the ball at the point it’s passed,” says Brandon. “It’s feasible. The challenge is how to help the referee and the video ref to make a decision and not confuse them. The data needs to be presented the right way.”

Data from the smartball microchip was previously kept on the laptops of pitchside rugby analysts; now we can all see it. Photograph: James Robinson/Sportable/Sage

Technology’s nuanced relationship with referees was encapsulated in Sunday’s Pacific Championship final in Sydney. A pass by Australia’s Tom Dearden to Tom Trbojevic went three metres forward but his technique was textbook – hands pointing slightly backwards, elbows out – and therefore passed muster. But Hamiso Tabuai-Fidow’s tip-on went a metre forward to Xavier Coates, which caused the bunker to disallow Trbojevic’s try, as they also did when “Turbo Tom” appeared to have scored after squirming through three Tongans to touch the ball down only for the touch judge to advise the referee, Ashley Klein, to check the grounding. There was downward pressure but, as he suspected, it was on to the hand of the full-back Lehi Hopoate. Current ball-tracking technology would have been unable to reliably adjudicate on either incident.

Football goalline cameras only need to judge the whereabouts of the ball, likewise the NFL balls with Zebra technology, where the ball only has to break the plane of the goalline to be a touchdown. “Because we’ve got radio frequency ultra-wideband, if the ball is tucked up someone’s jumper or there are three players on top of each other, we can always track where the ball and players are – and fast,” says Brandon. “We can tell if it’s across the line, and we know there’s force and compression applied, which would be one less thing for the referees to worry about. But we still have no solution as to whether it’s on the ground or on somebody’s leg. That would be nice.”

One major advantage of this setup is that, unlike football’s VAR, which requires cameras to be installed at every stadium at huge expense, Sportable’s system is fully portable. It has 12 anchor points which can be on tripods, so once a fortnight a club can move it from the training ground to their stadium before every home match. Installed at the main Six Nations stadiums, if a Women’s Six Nations game is played elsewhere the setup can be deployed there. So it appears only a matter of time, and cost, until smartball use becomes widespread.

“It’s feasible for most professional leagues because it’s portable,” claims Brandon. “It’s not ridiculous expensive. There are potential cheaper alternatives but it needs to be accurate and it needs to last.” Smartballs are already being used in Super Rugby, Major League Rugby in America and the NRL, and by several Premiership clubs, so expect to see ball-tracking data on our screens in every competition soon. But as for definitive decisions on forward passes and tries being scored? We shall have to wait.

One more thing

Ten years ago, the London Broncos youngster Harvey Burnett made his Scotland debut against France as they lifted the European Championship title. An exuberant, fearless and unique character, the former Esher RFC, London Skolars, Oxford and Bradford centre died a couple of weeks ago, aged 29, after years living with a rare and brutal cancer. Rest in peace Harv.

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