How To Analyse Your Badminton Matches
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 🙂
