Wayne Inch is the member of the Highlanders squad whose working week only really begins when the final whistle sounds.
Inch is the analyst, the number-cruncher and the technical expert whose long hours spent at a flickering computer screen are invaluable to the team's chances on the field.
On a Sunday, Inch is the guy in Highlanders colours whose eyes are red, but it is not because he has been out celebrating a win or drowning his sorrows after a loss. It's because he has been up all night collecting data.
His weekend begins when he arrives at the ground about three hours before kick-off to set up his computer and camera equipment, hook into Sky Television's various feeds and equip the coaches' box with all their requirements.
During the game, he watches the screen and notes statistics and trends, relaying to the coaches information such as where balls are being thrown to the line-out and where the opposition runners are targeting the Highlanders' defence.
He also makes sure the coaches have access to the referee's microphone and a camera view that has a 15sec delay, making it easy for them to look at something that has just happened.
After the game, Inch packs up his gear and again liaises with Sky camera operators to get their views of the game.
About 3am the next day, a bleary-eyed Inch checks his email, which includes all the statistics from the Highlanders' game and other Super 14 games. He lines them up with the video footage and loads them on to laptops by 9am, when the coaches arrive at the office to review the game.
Like all teams in the competition, the Highlanders are heavy users of a programme called TryMakerPro, from Palmerston North company Verusco. It features all Super 14 games and all Super 14 players, breaking everything down into a multitude of statistics.
With a tap of his mouse, Inch - and the coaches - can find out how many times a player carried the ball or made an offload, who made the advantage line the most or broke the line, and which players ranked highly in a Key Performance Indicator system.
There are video clips attached to every statistic, and one part of the programme allows the viewer to click on a part of the field, and view everything that happened there. The screen can even be split into four to see different angles of one incident.
Inch, who also films every Highlanders and Otago training session and unit drills, said there was a wide acceptance now that video analysis was a vital part of rugby.
‘‘It's more important but it's also a lot easier. Players and coaches can look at their stats but have also got the video to look at,'' he said.
‘‘Most people are now fairly heavily into it. I think it took a while. But coaches and player know how to use the system now.''
Inch's tools of the trade will fill plenty of cases when the Highlanders leave on Saturday for three weeks in Africa. He will take about 70kg of gear, including laptops, video capture devices, DVD players, DVD recorders, cameras, speakers, transmitters, radios, external hard drives, a data projector and metres of cables and cords.
He collects data on opponents weeks in advance, and the New Zealand franchises have an agreement to share DVDs of different camera views.
Inch loves his job because he loves rugby. He used to follow Otago religiously, and in 1994 was approached by then Dunedin coach Shayne Flanagan to do analysis at club level.
‘‘At that stage, they were just using someone to do spreadsheets with all the stats. I brought a video camera and started videoing the games. I think I was the only one videoing for a few years.''
In his tiny, windowless office at Logan Park, Inch always has the television tuned to the Rugby Channel, and the walls are covered with rugby memorabilia.
In pride of place are an All Black blazer worn by Otago prop Ray Dalton on the 1949 tour of South Africa, and the jersey Otago first five-eighth Colin Gillies wore in his sole test at Carisbrook in 1936.
Besides his technical wizardry, Inch is known for his boundless optimism and his weekly predictions of a Highlanders win.
He's calling it 16-14 to the Highlanders against the Sharks on Friday night. But he won't reveal how the game is going to be won.
