ABSTRACT
Variables used in performance analysis have some key differences to those used in other sports science disciplines. In kinanthropometry for example, variables such as height, body mass and even fitness test performances are relatively stable with changes occurring only over long-term periods. Variables used in performance analysis, on the other hand can vary considerably from match to match as well as within the same match (O’Donoghue, 2004). The main source of variability in performance is opposition effects (McGarry and Franks, 1994), with other sources of variability in performance including scoreline effects within games (Shaw and O’Donoghue, 2004) and match venue (Devlin et al., 2004). Further evidence of match to match variability was provided by an exercise that compared independent samples of tennis players from different regions (Wells et al., 2004). When each player’s performance was represented by a single match, there was much greater within sample variance than when two, three, four or five matches were used to derive a typical performance for each player.
