Hello and welcome back to Badminton Insight if you're new here we're Greg and Jenny two professional
badminton players and we also release a new video every Sunday on all things badminton! Yeah and we're
leaving in a few days for the Thailand Open so as we prepare for this tournament we're going to
do some match analysis yeah we've had a lot of requests for a video on how we analyse matches
so in this video we're going to give you a step-by-step guide of what we do and how you can
do it too so if you look at this document here you can see we've got a very long list of matches that
we've analysed this is for almost every opponent we've ever played including notes from both before
and after the match whilst that might look overwhelming remember that's data from the
last eight years this analysis often doesn't take more than 15 to 20 minutes and it can help
you win more matches! But how? Well as we just alluded to the first reason is that watching
your opponents before you play them can help your preparation for your match against them
and the second reason is that watching your match back after you've played is a great way
to analyse your strengths and weaknesses. So we're now going to go through the four steps we follow
when analysing a match hopefully giving you lots of useful tips along the way so the first thing
we look for is our opponent's common serve and return patterns. We've been gathering data for
over two years now on the percent of doubles rallies that are over within the first three or
four shots and for professionals between 30% and 40% of rallies are over within the first
four shots and for intermediate players which 71% of you said you were on a recent survey we did
this goes up to between 40% and 50% with many matches even higher than this, that's crazy!
crazy indeed and it hopefully makes you realize just how important getting an advantage in this
area of the game is so when we're doing our analysis we'll fill out this template if you
want to get this same template for yourself completely free then it's on our website we'll
include a link in the description below :) Yeah it's very simple to fill out but provides us with lots
of useful information so in this first section here we'll fill in the serve placement so did
the opponents flick? How often did they serve low to the T or low out wide to the tramlines? etc etc
this is really useful to know because if for example your opponents literally never flick then
you can move your starting position forwards and be earlier and more aggressive onto the low serve
we'll also do this with their return of serves so often players will have a favourite return of serve
they play if you serve to a certain area and once we've seen their favourite or most common returns
we'll look at what they do next so for example if they hit a soft return into the mid court on 50%
of their returns where are the gaps in the court after this? Yeah or where can you serve to stop
them doing their favourite return, is there a place they really struggle returning from? Yeah and it's
also really important to look out for what they do in key moments of the match as people often
revert back to what they're comfortable with - so at 19 all for example! This is the part of the
match analysis that will take the most time but for doubles it's definitely the most important
and for singles you can gain a lot of advantage too and if we're analysing our own match back then
we'll use this template too! This helps us to see if we were using enough variety in our serve and return
and ultimately where we got success and maybe where we didn't okay so the next step focuses
on what happens after the first three shots and in particular your opponent's standout weaknesses
now you don't want to be leaving your match analysis with a list of length of your arm because
you're not going to remember all of these things so try and pick out their top two or three main
weaknesses an example of a standout weak point might be that they only hit their defensive shots
straight and can't hit it cross because of their positioning or grip these are things you can then
action in a match so here you'd hit your smash and your partner instantly knows to move to intercept
this straight shot yeah and it's obviously also important to look out for any standout strengths
maybe they always smash cross court to the tram lines and it's usually a winner or maybe they have
a really good drop shot. Looking out for these things and being aware of them might mean that
you don't get caught out in a match potentially being the difference between winning and losing!
Step number three of analysing a match is to look out for your opponent's mentality and attitude
Do they get stressed or angry with their partner? Do they time waste or try and make you annoyed?
Knowing these things helps you be more prepared for the match! Yeah and if you're watching your
own match back you can do the same do you look nervous during certain points and did you notice
a difference in your game as a result? Or do you look absolutely exhausted which has given your
opponents a mental edge that they're less tired than you? We'll usually finish this match analysis
process by reminding ourselves of our strengths and how we should use these to our advantage
yeah and if you're watching your own matchback don't forget to analyse not
only what you could improve on but also some positives too - what did you do well in that match?
what have you improved on since you've been working on it? It's always good to have some
positivity and knowing your strengths is actually really important to give you confidence on court!
yeah and as a general guide when we're analysing our opponents we'll usually watch two sets of
one specific match or sometimes if there's a lot of footage available we'll watch one set of
two different matches to see if the opponents play differently against different opponents
we know most of you won't have videos available of your opponents but you can still do this at your
club night when you're sat off watching! So that's our four-step guide on how you can analyse a match
now we have an exciting video we want to do on the channel but it requires your help yeah we want to
analyse you our subscribers and your badminton so if you want to get involved with this video and have
your game analysed by us for free then firstly get a video of you playing for no more than 90 seconds
in length and you can cut out the breaks then send it to us at contact@badminton- insight.com via
wetransfer by the 29th of may and the video should be filmed in either 1080p which is what most
phones do or 4k if you want to go all out and it should also be in a horizontal format if you have
any questions leave a comment below and yeah send in your video if you want to get involved yeah we
actually do an in-depth video analysis every month on our Patreon where we analyse one of our patron's
matches so if you're interested in that we'll include a link in the description below yeah
and finally don't forget to SMASH the subscribe button and turn the notification bell on so you
don't miss out on our future videos and we'll hopefully see you on another one very soon bye :)