Richard Cockerill Column: You may not know this guy but he's key to our success
There will not be too many supporters of Leicester Tigers who have heard of a guy called Simon Barbour. But he is extremely important to the success of the team on the field.
Simon is our team analyst. His role on the coaching side of things has grown more and more as the years have gone by, and I can only see him becoming more and more influential.
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Leicester Tigers director of rugby Richard Cockerill
He is instrumental in what we do week to week, and I doubt any professional club would be able to function without an analyst in their ranks.
Simon will provide myself, Matt O'Connor and the other coaches with footage of the previous four games of the club we are due to play at the weekend.
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In that video footage will be details of set-pieces, and anything else we may want to look at to give us a heads-up on how that opposition may play.
We can look at how individuals in the opposition play their game with a detailed view of their stats. It is all available at the touch of a button.
Unfortunately for our players, the coaches all have the same details available to study their game, too!
There is certainly no hiding place.
That focus on one player can be very useful if one of our guys wants to study the likely behaviour of his opposite number or a key member of the opposition.
We are certainly not short of preparation for any side we may play against.
We use a market leader in performance analysis software, called SportsCode V9, and a revolutionary iPad-based data collection software called iCoda V2 for monitoring training.
It is all very technical, but the ease of use means that we can all get a lot out of it.
Simon is our pioneer with that software, it is his expertise and he drives what we can do on that front.
That makes him a very valuable part of our coaching staff and, in turn, he needs to know exactly what we are trying to do.
The job of the analyst at Tigers started with former scrum-half Jamie Hamilton, who began filming some of his scrum-half coaching sessions. From there, he became a full-time analyst before moving to New Zealand.
We got Simon in and his job has been getting more and more important with every passing year.
As a director of rugby, I always have to make sure there is not too much analysis to the detriment of practicalities and feel.
There is a saying in the trade that you can slip up due to "paralysis by analysis" if you are not careful.
You can look at statistics all day if you want to and convince yourself that something is the right thing to do.
But if you just picked a team on statistics, I guarantee you would come unstuck.
I will be looking for a response from the players against Exeter at Welford Road tomorrow after defeat last week.
We all admitted that the defeat by Harlequins was not good enough.
Ultimately, that is my responsibility. But the players have been making some good noises about putting right the wrongs this week.
Now it is up to them to carry that out on the pitch.
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