Hi, How does one analyze a recording of a badminton match, professional or not? What can be gained from them besides the enjoyment of watching them? It is probably too difficult to analyze technique, but perhaps studying placement/shot selection is easier? How so?
Enjoyment, yes. Study? Experience are a great teacher. So we learn from our failure & better yet if we could learn from others experience. How? See their technique, we might not pro player but still its a good point to learn how thing executed. See where all the player position & how they move in what situation. See the winning shot, how could the team execute the winning shot & see why the other side losing a point? Do they out of position? How could their formation destroyed? What strategy used to break their formation? Play simulation. If you do this it would be better. If you do that you wont be in trouble.
Statistics and data. Probably the easiest one is to look at serve. You could even do it on the practice court. Get a load of shuttles, hit high serves. Examine the percentage that fall in the back tramlines, out or short. If you want to compare to the professional match, pick a couple where the players do high serves and then check where the receiver stands when hitting the return. Obviously you need time to collect statistics. The people at badminton insight watched 20 hours of Zheng Siwei and Huang Yaqiong matches to help compile a ten minute video
Pretty much everything can be gained. When people talk about what is good technique, they really determine it from watching the top international players. Given a particular scenario, eg looking at their footwork and their racket action. They can notice, if one player is hardly moving, so maybe the other player needs to consider their shot selection more! You can learn basics like where pro players stand when they serve and return a serve. (If less quick well that's a slight adaptation of that). You can learn what a player does straight after they serve Compare that to what would you do. Sometimes you can be simultaneously pleased and horrified if comparing yourself to a pro. Cos in a particular rally, you might do the right thing broadly, and win the point though if LCW would look a heck of a lot more graceful doing it. So you can see the visual differences there and work on that if you want. Use slow mo. Or could be you did a footwork that no pro players would ever do, maybe that was not intended and can be improved . If somebody here says something then you can check if what they are saying is correct. Or to make sure you understand what they are saying. Everybody's learning, we are all rubbish compared to the pros. Everybody learns from the pros. You are not as tall as Axelson, oh dear, well. Look at Yagamuchi! You can learn how somebody with short legs can cover a whole court, for any scenario. It's unbelievable what can be learned. And some people notice a heck of a lot. And can point things out. You can watch a pro thinking how would you deal with it . Wait till you see something where they dealt with it differently. And watch yourself where you would think you dealt with it like them and you did broadly but as mentioned, in the fine details you maybe didn't, that cause it to look different. Watch where you think you dealt with it differently maybe you see you did it wildly wrongly. For one thing a total beginner can learn that they are supposed to stay on the badminton court! There is a ton of information the difficult thing can be to see it when you don't know.
What is your goal? Are you scouting your upcoming rivals and seeing how they lose points or where their weaknesses and tactics are lacking? Are you interested in the sport and seeing when to play specific shots? Are you watching footwork and how players attack and defend? Are you watching to see the differences between male, female, mixed, singles and doubles matches? I learned a lot on a weekend group coaching session two weekends ago. Watching some professional games after and it opened my eyes "oh wow, they don't stand square on with their feet when defending".
I learnt badminton by watching and playing the game similar to most people in England. Although I did get some coaching occasionally, I wouldn't say it was systematic and certainly the basic foot positioning was not something I can ever remember. I had already played league and open tournaments but easily hit a ceiling with my very obvious English strength based style and lack of efficient movement. I decided to re-engineer my game from the very, very basic foundations. In the very first lesson, the coach (from mainland China) taught me the feet positioning just like you mentioned. It's not square on. Then I got taught the three step diagonal forward movement and kept getting my left and right legs mixed up with which leg to step forward first. I still have my original notebook with the sketches of the feet positioning and the footwork patterns that I would go and practice in the living room. I was madly obsessed with grooving the proper footwork patterns for moving around the court. I was playing with a lower level group and would continually reflect on whether I was getting the right footwork stance in the rally and would shadow the correct footwork between the points. BTW, I trained singles and have right foot slightly forward whereas doubles is left foot a bit more than slightly forward.
What does that even mean?... There's two ways of standing when a smash might be coming. One method has feet very front back.. The other method has feet not completely square(to where you are facing), but one foot very slightly in front of the other. Just a general ready stance so one is ready to move front and back or sideways. (I don't recall the advantages and disadvantages of each.. I recall a coach used to tell me of the one foot slightly in front method, but then told me that nowadays sometimes the players have a front back position sometimes, maybe to help retrieve the drops) Maybe some beginner level ones stand completely square without one foot slightly in front of the other? I haven't tried that maybe it works too! When you went to a weekend group coaching, did they stand completely square? Or did they stand one foot a little in front of the other? Was it intermediate level, or beginner level? or advanced level? And the pros you saw, they indeed probably wouldn't have been completely square, but were they standing with one foot slightly in front of the other? Or were they standing with feet quite front back?
It means I went on a weekend group coaching course. One tidbit of information that was imparted to me was not being completely "Square on" when defending. Having one foot slightly more forward than the other (also when partner is receiving a serve in doubles). I then watched some professional games and saw it in action. I can draw you a pretty picture if that will help you understand my two lines of text you quoted
