It’s Monday morning at Leicester Tigers training ground, and Michael Cheika, the head coach, opens an app on his phone. It looks at the scores out of 10 that its stars from England and around the world recorded in key categories: not meters run or tackles made, but quality of sleep, mood, muscle pain, fatigue and energy.

“It’s a risk assessment and it’s information,” says Cheika. “We work on a daily basis, there’s so much going on and every day when you log in you can see if there’s anything you need to dig into before the day starts.”

It’s rare to go behind the scenes at Oval Park, where Cheika and the Tigers are about to meet. Bristol Bear in the Premiership this weekend – a third versus second match – with 11 league titles as a historic backdrop.

But Cheika meets The I Poper to speak through the athlete management “intelligence platform” developed by Kitman Labs.

One reason is that elements of the software are now shared by the England team and the Premiership clubs, within the Professional Game Partnership. Another is to understand how Cheika wants Leicester to be perceived.

“When you take care of the player, you get a better return on him,” he says. “And then we want it to become word of mouth.” Ultimately, we get a reputation of ‘let’s go, they look after their guys, there’s a good level of coaching, you can have a longer career’.

A generation ago, Leicester and sports science were far from synonymous. The club’s English players often joked with journalists keen to know about fights in training – such as a ‘rally’ between Lewis Moody and Martin Johnson in 2004.

“Tempers flared and he gave me a little drink and I gave him a little drink,” Moody said at the time. “His little drink made him hurt even more.”

Cheika doesn’t make fun of that era – he also played and coached in that era – but around the same time, in 2005, he joined Leinster in Ireland as head coach and began working with Kitman founder Stephen Smith, who was an academy player turned strength and conditioning coach.

Cheika owned a lucrative clothing company that used data to make decisions. Smith had a great interest in sports science and was fascinated by the idea of ​​transforming Leinster’s enormous amount of medical and other data into something relevant to high performance.

They reduced injuries to people like Brian O’Driscoll by 30 percent per year, while training players “three times harder” to make them fit to play.

Today, as Leicester and England, for example, aim to advance the injured Ollie Chessum back in time for Six NationsThey can look at data together on everything from numerous stress measures to distance traveled in training.

They can review matches, medical records and make graphic comparisons to players in his position and his own past performances. This is just a glimpse of the details accumulated by a technology that took 10 years to develop.

“I’m lucky,” says Cheika, “because I acquired knowledge from a long time ago, as a pioneer – even if I look old school. The first person to introduce GPS into European rugby, and I always try to innovate with different technologies because I think it can help us become better.

And does that ‘old school’ description bother the 57-year-old with a coaching CV that also includes Stade Français, the Waratahs, Australia and Argentina?

“It doesn’t matter,” Cheika said. “I don’t mind what the average person wants to think – it’s more about what I bring to the team. “Old school” for me is the basics of the game: endurance, toughness, commitment, level of contact – so it’s not really old school, it’s continuous, it’s still there.

“Or if ‘old school’ is a way to describe the way things used to be done, well, one of the biggest differences is how the players take care of themselves after the game. We give the players two day weekends here, so in theory they are free today after the Sharks game on Saturday, but the boys are here, using cryotherapy Recovery is huge, because you have to be able to save.

“We can now compete on a Tuesday and a Thursday, in a different way: we train hard. Sometimes I just stand there, poking around and jumping in – but if these guys hit me properly, I’d be in the hospital; the power level is much higher.

“At the same time, the game will last longer with the ball, which is a good thing. There are all these demands on players, which makes the technology even more important.

There are still tensions in the system. The new deal covering all international players, not just England’s, meant Leicester had to be without Handre Pollard, Tommy Reffell, Nicky Smith, Julian Montoya and George Martin for one week in three after the autumn tests. Cheika chose the away match in Bordeaux and the Tigres lost 42-28.

“I like the concept, I like the ideology and you should run a games cap,” says Cheika. “But I take care of my guys all the time.”

When it comes to selection, he says there’s still room for “feel”, so he’ll never just point to an app or a laptop – it just helps when people like Mike Brown “slam the door” when he doesn’t. be chosen.

“I feel sad all the time,” says Cheika, smiling. “Browny is here, he plays football at 39, he’s still doing well. And to me, that kind of thing is incredible. I love it.

“Players want to invest more and more, not just in the short term of their career, but in the long term – they want to play longer, right? There is a financial gain for them, but also an emotional gain.