Donach O'Donnell turning over vital hurling data: Work-rate key to All-Ireland success

TONIGHT’S episode of TG4’s The Underdogs will see the players undergo a session with Mallow native Donach O’Donnell.

Manager of Clare side O’Callaghan’s Mills for the past three seasons, O’Donnell has previously served as coach to Limerick and Laois, while he has recently completed a Master’s degree in applied sports coaching at the University of Limerick, under Dr Philip Kearney and Dr Ian Sherwin.

For his research project as part of the two-year course, O’Donnell investigated the relationship between turnovers and scoring in top-level hurling. One of his discoveries was that 72 percent of goal opportunities originated inside the attacking team’s own 45m line, while half of all turnovers are almost immediately turned over again.

“The actual project itself was the best part of six months to a year, the second year of the course,” O’Donnell says.

“The bottom line is that there has been very little research done on hurling and hurling-related skills. Damien Young had done a lot of work on the physiological side, using GPS and so on, but as far as hurling was concerned, there was a very little.

“There was a paper by Colm Clear and Denise Martin in 2017 and then there was one by Paul O’Brien in 2021. Really, apart from those, there wasn’t a huge amount on hurling so I knew that that’s where I was going.

“Workrate and tackling was always something that intrigued me, even back to the 1990s. You look at Clare winning two All-Irelands with fairly limited forwards, with all due respect – Jamesie O’Connor was a phenomenal point-scorer but there weren’t too many other prolific scorers in that group.

“You’re saying to yourself, where did the All-Irelands come from and it’s from the work-rate. Then you had Kilkenny basing themselves on that a few years later and now Limerick are at it. 

Their work-rate and their contact tackling and that kind of stuff is why they’re successful.

“You come away from games sometimes and you’re looking at them saying it was very tough and very hard but to be critical of something and analyse it properly, you have to sit down in the cold light of day in front of a screen and look exactly where the tackles are coming from and where the ball is going. You have to take the emotion out of it.

“I broke turnovers down into four different sections – an intercept, which would be a non-contact change of possession; a tackle, which is actual contact or a hook or a block; a shot dropping short; or just an unforced error or a mistake. Out of those, around 50 percent were tackles, intercepts and unforced errors were about 20 percent each.”

Parsing the data involved quite a lot of legwork.

“I sat through the 2019 season, 26 championship games,” O’Donnell says.

“Initially, I did hand-notation to get an idea and then I got a lend of computer software from Alan Duggan, a friend of mine in TUS and I ended up coding the games.

Some things surprise you and then others were quite logical, like the fact that an awful lot of goal opportunities came from inside your own 45 – it’s the equivalent of a counter-attack in soccer, a fast break from inside your own half.

“When a team is attacking and they’re dragged out of position, there’s more opportunity to counter.
“At inter-county level, the numbers are quite similar. There’s only two or three percent of a difference, on average, between winning and losing teams where tackles and turnovers are concerned.

“The passing chain is very important too, the amount of passes in a row. Eight-two percent of them were three passes or fewer – so if you put together three passes, you usually end up with a shot.

“The problem with the tackle is that they’re usually in congested areas and so half of them are turned over again. It’s the teams that put the passes together after that tackle usually get the ball into a scoring position.”

Ultimately, O’Donnell is hopeful that the findings can help him and other coaches.

“I went off and gave examples of how you could put a drill into practice reflecting the data,” he says, “such as using small-sided games which are beneficial and allow more ball time in a tight situation.

OPTIONS

“At the same time, it has to be at the back of your mind all the time as a coach that, while statistics and data can improve your situation, you can delve too much into it and be too tied to it.

“Because a team is doing something and are successful, it doesn’t mean that it’ll make you successful. The bottom line is that if you’ve a big full-forward and you can get ball into him that he’ll win, that’s always an option to have.

“No matter how many passes you put together outside, the route one might serve you better. It depends on your personnel and depends on the way you’re training them.

“Three passes is optimal at the moment but in the future we might find that five or six passes is optimal. Data always changes, it’s always evolving.”

• See here for Donach O'Donnell's findings