Indian football team using mobile app to improve performances

What’s the story?

Technology has embraced every part of our lives these days, and football is no different. The game, which was once a simple affair of kicking a ball and trying to put it into the back of the net, has evolved drastically with the advent of technology.

Goal line technology, statistical evaluation of each player, heatmaps, on-field cameras have all come into the game. Notably, the Indian football team is not alien to such advancements as they themselves are using a mobile application in order to improve player performances. It goes by the name of “Zora” and has been put into use over the last couple of weeks or so.

Daniel Deigan, the fitness and conditioning coach of the national squad, who spoke to leading Bengali daily Anandabazar Patrika regarding this, said, “ We rarely get the players together for long in the national camp, so it was imperative to track them on regular intervals. Hence we came up with this app, which now makes it a lot easier to cope up with the lack of information which we faced before.”

In case you didn’t know

Many top-tier clubs and international teams use a host of technological services to track the growth of footballers, and to keep managers and coaching staff updated about their injuries, recovery times and whereabouts.

This app is aimed to function the same way, except that the players will have to number themselves on the basis of their day-to-day activities and the data will be sent instantaneously to Daniel.

The heart of the matter

“Zora” has a range of different categories like hours trained, hours slept, fatigue felt, muscles strained so on and so forth. The players, which include the likes of Sunil Chettri and Gurpreet Singh Sandhu, are supposed to mark their daily activities on a scale of ten and send the same to the team management.

Daniel and his team, which includes head coach Stephan Constantine, will then calculate the changes each player needs to incorporate in his regime to maximise their efficiency.

What’s next?

According to midfielder Pronay Haldar, the app has simplified things on a lot of fronts for them since they can now receive recommendations and suggestions from the medical team at the earliest possible instance and they won’t have to wait for detailed emails enquiring about their routines and diets.

This will hopefully show in the team’s performances in the coming month.

Sportskeeda’s take

With the 2019 AFC Asian Cup Qualifiers beginning in March, the onus is on the Indian team to put in a good display after their horrendous outing in the FIFA World Cup Qualifiers last year. It is good to see the AIFF and the management take up stringent measures to ensure the footballers remain in the best of shape even when they are not on national duty, and it can only bode well for the future.