VHS tapes sent to the South Pacific - How the football data boom started by Rob HaywoodBBC Sport
Last update on April 18, 202218 April 2022.From the football section pollard, in The photo of the Conference in 1985
was another beautiful day in Fiji When Richard Pollard came to work at the South Pacific University in March 1986.
Reviewing your pigeon hole On the way to his office, he found an envelope quilted between the usual correspondence. He had a watford, England airmail label and matasel label.
This is how a coincidence analysis was carried out by a high-level English club in the 1980s , relying on the only tape recording of a long distance air mail, having handmade analysis and then returned for 12 months later.
In the mid-1980s, Pollard had already been fascinated by football data for more than two decades Like other FloeTGling analysts of the 1960s, he read him the first published works of Charles Reep (1904-2002), seen by some like the godfather of modern football analysis.
The REEP was the first data analyst that will work directly with a professional football club, starting at Brentford in 1951 and finding a great success with the wolves later in the same decade.
At the time of Pollard's first visit In the mid-1960s, the reep had accumulated hundreds of data coincidences detailing the movements that pass, the goal attempts or where the teams won and lost possession. In the cozy room of the front of him, the piles of handwritten notes, the written formulas and the large plaques showing the last diagrams of the coincidence would be awarded and dissected.
The reep had developed a unique technique that allowed him to collect data for each team in real time. The problem was that he had to do everything at hand. To prepare a table of your notes of each step that passes, let's say, the final of the 1958 World Cup, it would spend 80 hours working on it. Pollard will soon be able to work much faster. The Atlas computer occupied two large rooms, in the photo, here is the "engineer console"
"When The Computer Revolution began, should not be left behind, I made a title in applied computing, "says Pollard. "A course was statistical computing, I soon realized that the data of the reep lent to the type of multivariate analysis that could only be done on a computer."
The computer in question, the Atlas 1, is now HAIZED at the Kensington Science Museum, but between 1964 and 1972 was instead in Gordon Square in Bloomsbury for use from the University of London. Inside the beautiful Georgian terraces was hiding the
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