April was no joke for Jamie McGrath. The Republic of Ireland midfielder scored in three Scottish Premiership matches in a row for Dundee United, including winners against Hibs and Motherwell before opening the deadlock at home to Livingston.
The first two were from the penalty spot but the latter goal was particularly pleasing for the Meathman. It saw him drift unmarked into a pocket of space just outside the box before unleashing a fizzing low strike into the bottom corner of the net. The finish itself was excellent but for McGrath, more personal satisfaction came from the reason why he feels he was able to get into a dangerous position in the first place.
"We worked on trying to find them pockets behind the striker," the 26-year-old tells RTÉ Sport.
"So I peeled off at an angle that we spoke about and getting strikes away is something we talk about."
The 'we' McGrath refers to is his regular Zoom sessions with coaching duo Dr Kevin O'Grady and Gerard Moran, whose Incision Football platform is working with a current client base of 14 footballers to hone the finer details of their games. The ultimate goal of the sessions is to improve players' decision-making in and out of possession.
McGrath training under the watchful eye of Stephen Kenny during the Match window
Apart from McGrath, they are working with a clutch of current or recent Irish U21 internationals like Andy Lyons, Liam Kerrigan, Neil Farrugia, Lee O'Connor, Johnny Kenny and Colm Whelan as well as Georgie Kelly who went from banging in goals for Bohemians to establishing himself for Rotherham United.
The idea for Incision Football was born three years ago in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. O'Grady - son of Cork hurling great Dónal - and Moran had gotten to know each other whilst studying together for their UEFA A coaching licences.
Both had experience of coaching first-hand, with O'Grady - a specialist in oral surgery by trade - having taken charge of men's and women's university teams in the Liverpool area where he has been based in recent years.
Moran, meanwhile, had been immersed in coaching youth teams at League of Ireland level since his teens, latterly helping to get Treaty United's academy set-up off the ground. At the same time, his day job has seen him work with sports tech and analytic tools, including for the FAI as a digital product lead before taking on his current role as head of product for ClubForce.
But the onset of the pandemic had seen in-person meet-ups and coaching forcibly paused and the duo decamped to Zoom to interchange tactical ideas, discuss video clips in depth and cultivate their coach education.
Moran came to the conclusion that players could also gain plenty from going through their individual match clips with the help of coaches and analysts in a way that is not possible to do extensively within the hectic confines of a club.
"I had an inkling, and Kev would as well, that this would work because we had done a lot of this with players but just not in the environment that we'd done it," he says.
"We had done it in club and team environments, so this environment was a bit different because you're not part of their club. That's the bit that's definitely very different than if you're a team analyst."
He had a contact for Shamrock Rovers winger Neil Farrugia, while O'Grady had a connection to Jamie McGrath via family friend and hurling coach Eddie O'Donnell.
Both players were receptive to the idea of a process that to the unintiated, in the loosest sense, could translate as 'grinds for footballers' and thus Incision Football started.
Each Zoom session with a player runs for 45 minutes to an hour with a focus on working through tactical and positional scenarios with the aid of up to 10-15 clips.
Three-time Ireland U21 cap Liam Kerrigan, who has been with Italian Serie B side Como since last summer, began working with Incision on the recommendation of his former UCD team-mate Colm Whelan.
"Kevin would say nearly every Zoom call, 'I'm never going to tell you how to kick a ball or pass a ball, I'm only going to tell you where to look or where to find space,'" said the 22-year-old Sligo native who also confirmed that he is on the cusp of a return from an ACL injury sustained last September.
"It's never on the mechanical stuff, it's more so how your brain is thinking at the time or being alive to where the space is and areas on the pitch that you can cause a bit of trouble and do damage.
"But what I really like about it is they don't answer the questions for you. They'll show you a clip and say, 'What could you have done here?' And I'll say, 'Play that again' or 'Pause it there' and then you'll almost answer the question yourself with their help. They're not feeding you the answers but they're making you think about what you did and 'why did you do that'. I think that's a better way of making you learn rather than just telling you, 'You should have done this' or 'you should have done that'."
Kerrigan in action for Como last August
But with their methodology, O'Grady and Moran need to do lot of groundwork before the Zoom sessions, whether it's collating performance data, poring over video sourced via scouting tools like Wyscout and consulting with both players and management teams about the tactical and technical context the player is operating within.
"To describe Wyscout, it's Netflix for football. You can basically get every game in the world if you want it," O'Grady explains.
"Where that can be helpful from that point of view is you get all the games up quickly - sometimes within three hours – and sometimes they're the kind of time windows we're working on.
"A guy might have a game on a Saturday and then another game on Tuesday. Ideally, we wouldn't do a session between games, we like to give guys breaks, but if they feel they need it and make a request, we'll go that fast. So I've gone on Wyscout at 11pm on a Saturday night or 5 or 6am Sunday morning. That's the match-to-match kind of prep that we're doing and obviously you'd be keeping an eye on the types of stats and types of data that we're keeping an eye on."
To keep the sessions light and enjoyable, the onus is on the players to suggest areas of their games that they wish to focus on and they are not burdened with the data underpinning the clips they are looking through.
For a player like Andy Lyons, who has continued to thrive since joining Blackpool off the back of winning the title with Shamrock Rovers last season, the opportunity to be able to explore individual aspects of his game in-depth has been a welcome one since he began working with Incision after a referral from his good friend Kerrigan.
Andy Lyons was PFA Ireland Young Player of the Year for 2022 before starting life with Blackpool in January
"You're in an environment over in England, in Ireland, wherever you may play, and maybe you have a (team) analyst or two analysts but the reality of it is they don't have time or the resources to actually sit down with every individual player, do all their clips, it's not feasible really," says the wing-back.
"In terms of the decisions, Kev and Ger will always ask, 'What did you see in this moment?' It's not a case of 'this is what I would do' from their perspective. It's always a case of 'maybe there was potential to do this' in this clip. But they will always ask you first and just listen to your reasoning behind it because as players you more than likely have a reason behind the decisions we make."
Examples of the detail relayed include the individual traits of their team-mates in and out of possession, which gives the player a better understanding of how to dovetail with them or where to be positionally in relation to them in a fast-paced game.
The next step is taking what has been discussed on Zoom into a training session while also not stepping on the toes of the players' manager.
"Of the managers I've dealt with, obviously they've got questions. One of the most common questions is what happens if 'I say x and you say y,'" says O'Grady.
"So, you would always check the context of the situation for the player. It's pretty obvious then to the managers that they know we're onside. We're just trying to make Player A better and I think they can see us as a good resource.
"In the training session, you might be focusing on team stuff – team attacking, team defending – but in them moments, you will get an opportunity to focus on whether it's runs, direct runs into the box, whether it's how you're trying to receive the balls from certain angles. Or whether it's we talk to someone and say, 'Actually, you need to learn how this player plays a little bit better and understand their habits'. That doesn't take anything away from the training you're doing. If anything, it adds to it.
"You're still doing your team training and now it's giving them an individual focus within their training and I think if you look at a lot of the best teams that have coach-analysts like your Man City's and top Premier League teams, they're doing this. There's no player going in just doing a general team training session. Players are doing team training sessions with individual focus on how they develop within that team as well."
Jim Goodwin is currently managing McGrath at Dundee United as he did at St Mirren when the player first began working with Incision
McGrath, who takes copious notes after every session to then review in the lead-in to training and matches, feels his reading of the game and decision-making has improved, especially in regards to taking up dangerous positions.
"I scored a tap-in earlier on in the season and something that we talk about a lot is trying to just crash the middle of the goal as the ball is getting wide because I have a tendency to go out and help the winger," the former Dundalk and St Pat's player points out.
"But if you look at Frank Lampard, his tendencies were always to crash the middle of the box and more often than not, he ended up on the end of things. They're examples that you can take from it."
While Lyons plays further back as a full-back or wing-back, his goal contributions have been remarkable. He netted seven for Shamrock Rovers in the league last season and since joining Blackpool and beginning to work with Incision on how to position himself in attacking phases efficiently, he is one of the English Championship's highest-scoring defenders with four goals already since January.
"Playing as a full-back or wing-back, you mightn't get many opportunities - you might get five in a game - whereas (Erling) Haaland might get 25," Lyons says.
Lyons (l) has carried his goal-scoring traits from the LOI into the English Championship
"But the reality of it is he's scoring more goals because they create a lot more chances.
"But for me, if I'm in the right place for all of those five chances, I might get the ball 2-3 times. If a cross is coming in from the left and I'm standing on the edge of the box, the likelihood of me scoring is probably quite slim, so the reality of it is if I can get in the right area all the time for those five crosses, I'll more than likely probably get a chance out of one or two of them. That's how I work and we work, which is to be in the right place all the time as opposed to be in the right place at the right time if that makes sense.
"A lot of my goals have come from that. My goal against Luton, I scored a header from the free-kick and that wasn't a case of knowing where Lewis (Fiorini) was going to put the ball, it was a case of where I wanted the ball to go and the best chance of me scoring. I'll just go to that position and thankfully the ball went there and I was in the right position. But I was in the right position for all the time instead of just at that one moment."
Like Lyons, Kerrigan has not been playing abroad for long but his transition to life at Como was aided by the prep work he had done via Zoom with O'Grady on positioning given his versatility had seen the Italian club field him in a variety of roles prior to his injury.
"I don't remember playing right back underage but I was put into right back twice in my four games here, so even the first time I got put right back we did clips on defensive positioning and then when I was thrown in there again I did feel more confident about where to be because obviously with the language I had an Italian centre-back beside me so he's trying to help me in English but it mightn't get the message across as quick at the beginning when I couldn't understand much Italian," he says.
He is itching to get back into first-team action soon and that is fueled by the progress he made in his movement pre-injury.
"I have one clip that for Kevin must be his favourite clip of me in my second or third game here," Kerrigan says.
"You can see me actively looking for space and I've come in off the back post to the middle of the goals and got a free header. I hit the post and probably should have scored but that's my favourite clip because you can literally nearly see me looking for somewhere that is going to make me most dangerous and then the ball ends up on my head. To be honest, I was sickened that I missed but I was chuffed that I'm not the biggest fella in the world but I'm getting free headers in the box. It is like a grind that you're working on your game outside of football without - if you're doing extras on the pitch - taking it out of your body. But this stuff is making your brain better which is probably more important than your feet."
Kerrigan played against Italy for the Ireland U21s last year
As they continue to hone the Incision Football sessions, O'Grady and Moran point to the work-ethic of their clients – most of whom have come through the LOI - as a key factor in the players' progression.
But they believe that the way pathways have changed for Irish players in recent years is also having a positive knock-on effect.
"I think what we are is we're the cherry on top. We're just the final piece of the jigsaw to a player who's really keen to work and works very hard," says Moran.
"We help them. We're only with them an hour a week and they're doing 16 hours on the pitch a week and doing stuff with their own (club) analysts and coaches, so we just give them a little guide and maybe a little bit of help in terms of what they can look out for. But I think we have to give them a lot of credit.
"One of the advantages I do feel in Ireland that we have, particularly now with Brexit, is fellas are going over (to the UK) a little bit later so they're a bit more mature and they're maybe a little bit more educated as well. They're a bit more used to working on computers a bit more and used to reviewing stuff and I wonder as well are we getting guys who have a better chance of making it going over in the first place anyway and I think that's where the League of Ireland is brilliant. It is a tough league."
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