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Saracens players in the Wembley dressing room
Saracens' players can rewatch team-talks, complete with videos and diagrams, on their iPads. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian
Saracens' players can rewatch team-talks, complete with videos and diagrams, on their iPads. Photograph: Tom Jenkins for the Guardian

Saracens use iPads and statistics in order to make themselves the best

This article is more than 11 years old
The only English club left in the Heineken Cup have totally rejected the old playbook orthodoxy

Imagine, for a moment, you run a rugby club. How would you go about ensuring your team has the best chance of winning each week? What sort of players would you recruit? How would you seek to improve the ones you have? The obvious answer is to study a traditionally successful side such as Leicester and copy them. The alternative, as favoured by Saracens, is to try something completely different. As Sarries are the only English club still in this season's Heineken Cup, they must be doing something right.

Not everyone would have flown their players out to Germany last July to watch the heavyweight title fight between Wladimir Klitschko and David Haye. There have also been bonding trips to Miami, Cape Town and Abu Dhabi in the past 13 months. Not every club would celebrate the fact their defence coach, Paul Gustard, is running a marathon for charity in Northampton morning hours before a major European quarter-final against Clermont Auvergne in Watford. No other club in Britain has totally rejected the old playbook orthodoxy and given every staff member an iPad instead.

This thirst for innovation does not always deliver instant results, as last Saturday's defeat by Harlequins at Wembley proved. Nor does it always court popularity. Saracens, though, remain committed to stretching boundaries that some other clubs have barely noticed. "I don't want to be disparaging because I know there are a lot of people out there working really hard," says Edward Griffiths, the club's chief executive. "But rugby union remains far behind many other sports in the physical and mental preparation of players. There is so much more we can do in terms of getting the team on the field in the best state possible."

To illustrate his point, Griffiths describes how Saracens' pre-match team meetings have altered since specially encrypted iPads were doled out in February. "Typically, if we're playing on a Sunday we have a team talk on a Friday morning at 10.30. The players listen to the coaches, watch clips of the opposition and talk about our approach. Then everyone goes out and trains. That used to be it. Now the whole team-talk is put on the iPad, complete with diagrams and video clips, so the player can study it again, even if he's lying in bed on a Sunday morning. The amount of footage watched by our players last month compared with the previous month increased by something ridiculous like 2,500%."

Premier League football clubs, not surprisingly, have already expressed interest in the software.

There is more. The Sarries number-crunchers have been busy calculating what their side needs to do statistically to ensure victory, even to the extent that throwing too many passes in a game can backfire. "We've got people behind the scenes doing all that work and the stats don't lie," says Neil de Kock, the long-serving scrum-half. "We are a very stats-based club in terms of what leads to the ultimate result. If it means playing less rugby in one third of the pitch then it makes sense to do that. To a lot of people we are very pragmatic but if you look at how the game is being played it's difficult to argue. Two years ago we kicked the ball 90 per cent of the time in our own half. People used to slate us but the truth is it was effective."

Is this not all too robotic? Romantics remain sceptical but Sarries are being increasingly clever in marrying the law of averages with a range of other human qualities. Work-rate, honesty, discipline and humility are the four cornerstones of the club's ethos, as decreed by their former head coach Brendan Venter. Despite returning to South Africa for family reasons he remains the club's technical director and will be at the Clermont game. He also continues to insist every single player has a balanced life. "The deal from the outset was you had to be busy with something outside rugby, instead of sitting on the couch at home waiting for the next training session," says De Kock.

In Gustard's case, that has meant pledging to complete four marathons in four weeks this month in aid of the Hospice of St Francis (www.justgiving.com/Paul-gustard4), while trying to ensure Sarries are primed for their own run-in. Gustard enjoyed Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, which suggests experts in certain fields can instinctively be correct even when the evidence suggests otherwise, but believes technology has increasing relevance within rugby. "If you get paralysis by analysis you can come unstuck because rugby is a human game. But statistics can give you an evidence-based way to format a gameplan, to see areas where you may be struggling and to help selection. We try and pick out trends before disaster happens. We can also now give players accurate feedback even while they are still on the training field."

What happens when some idiot loses his iPad? "Funnily enough the first person who did was Edward Griffiths ... he left it in the bar," says Gustard.

Overall, though, this is an increasingly professional enterprise. Mix in the club's impending move to an artificial pitch in Mill Hill and it resembles a north London variant on the Moneyball philosophy that transformed the Oakland As in baseball. Player recruitment, not surprisingly, is Griffiths's next priority. "It doesn't make sense to be a club that simply recruits at the higher end of the market. We'd rather be a club that sees value where other people don't."

There will be continue to be hiccups, not least the present back-row injury crisis and the probability of England agreeing terms this month to hire their head coach, Andy Farrell. Saracens, nevertheless, have a potential replacement in Kevin Sorrell.

"We're desperate to beat Clermont but we don't need results to validate what we're doing," says Griffiths. "We know what we're trying to do. Our long-term goal is to establish a legacy as one of the top clubs in Europe."

If they get there, it will not be totally by chance.

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