How to find the important moments in a match video

The scenario is always the same. A parent or an assistant has filmed, the file has arrived, and the coach sits down on Sunday evening to "pull out the important moments". Two hours later, they have rewatched the whole match, found two of the four situations, forgotten what they were looking for in the third, and have a note for next week: stop doing this. The following week, the video is not watched.

The video is not the problem. A match video has no table of contents, and nobody reads a four-hundred-page book to find three sentences. You need markers, and they are placed during the match, not after.

Note during: the minute and a word

The most reliable marker fits on a sheet folded in your pocket: the minute and a word. "12 build-up", "34 goal", "51 failed press". Nothing else. Not a sentence, not a judgement, just enough to find the spot again. An assistant does it better than the head coach, who has other things to do during an action; failing that, a parent on the bench with the instruction to write down what they are shouted.

The only precaution that counts: set your watch to the start of the recording, not to kick-off. A phone started six minutes before the match shifts all the notes by six minutes, and "34 goal" lands on a harmless throw-in. Note the exact kick-off time on the same sheet, and the calculation is one subtraction.

Mark after the action, never before

This is the point that every marking system misses: you only know that an action deserves to be reviewed once it is over. Nobody plans a lost ball in the build-up; you notice it. Any setup that asks you to tap before, to "start recording the action", produces clips that begin too late and missed actions because you were watching the game.

The right habit is the reverse: the action ends, you note it, and the marker covers the ten to fifteen seconds before. Those are the ones that contain the cause. A goal is understood in the five seconds before, rarely in the shot itself.

Cut the same evening, not on Sunday

With the sheet, finding a sequence takes thirty seconds: you go forward to the noted minute, go back fifteen seconds, and watch. Cutting the three or four clips takes twenty minutes, as long as you do it on the evening of the match, when you still know why you wrote "51 failed press". On Sunday, that word no longer means anything.

Name the clips so that you can find them in two months: the match, the theme, the minute. "MD5 build-up 34" can be found; "final clip 2" never can. And limit yourself to three or four per match: the rule is detailed in how to analyse a match, and it comes down to one word: beyond three, players retain nothing.

The tools that help, and those that only find goals

• Chapters of an online video. A list of minutes in the description of a video becomes a clickable table of contents. Free, and players use it.
• The phone's trimming. The Photos app on any phone cuts a fifteen-second clip in three gestures. No need for editing software.
• Automatic summaries. They find goals and saves, because the crowd reacts. They do not find the build-up lost in the 34th minute, because nobody shouted. Yet that is the one the coach wants.

What you have to accept

You will miss things. One situation noted too quickly, another not noted at all because you were talking to the referee. That is the price of a method you can keep up: three sequences found in twenty minutes are worth more than fifteen sequences that nobody has time to look for. The club that reviews three situations every week improves; the one that archives whole matches does not reopen them.