What’s Happened Since July?

The first part of my features piece in The Times

The last thing I wrote here was about heat, altitude and what England were walking into in the World Cup. Three months on, the summer has turned into a run of work I did not fully see coming, so this is a catch-up rather than an argument. The arguments can wait for the next post.

The World Cup analysis went further than I expected. After the semi-final I went properly into FIFA’s physical performance data for all four semi-finalists and built out a case that England’s problem was not fitness. It was repeatability. The team could produce the numbers; it could not reproduce them, and the game model asked for outputs that could not be sustained across a tournament. That piece ran in The Times, and a few days later Thomas Tuchel was asked about the fatigue question in a press conference and confirmed the reading on record. I have done a lot of analysis in my career that only a few people read and used and/or disappeared into a hard drive or cloud. Having one land in public and be acknowledged by the person in charge of the team was new. The Telegraph followed with pieces on the heat physiology side, which built on the blog you are reading the successor to. Those are all now on the press and media page, which I have rebuilt to reflect the football work as well as the cycling.

No one asked me to write these articles. I was bored of reading and trying to compete with the LinkedIn sycophantic, humblebrag posts. I wanted to be more authentic. I just wrote articles and sent them to different journalists and eventually I got a bite. Initially, I was writing about the trouble the Iranian football team would be facing from a performance perspective with the war directly influencing their preparation. Whilst I had the credibility and experience, I had to be persistent as well as targetted.

All the articles can be found on my press & media coverage tab on this website.