M.Phil. (Optometry) / In football, vision is one of the key performance indicators and ingredients of success (Buys, 2002) and it is not uncommon to find a player underperforming in the field of play due to poor vision. Football is the world’s most popular sport, with the Football World Cup finals attracting record estimations of world-wide television audiences in the billions (Clark, 2007). In this sport, players must perform motor skills and control their posture during their game, while using visual information to collaborate with other team members or to oppose the opponent (Paillard & Noe’, 2006). Visual attention plays an important role in football, where players must monitor the activities and positions of multiple players simultaneously (Memmert, Simons & Grimme, 2009). As pointed out by Coopoo, Moss, Fortuin, Freese and Cameron (2012), visual capabilities and skills cannot be assumed as natural attributes but must be tested and subjected to training according to need. In this study quantitative and descriptive research is conducted to assess the visual skills of football players. Inferential statistics are done on the collected data to explain the performance of the players: A battery of twelve (12) vision related procedures were performed on each of sixty three (63) football players from two academies in Gauteng Province. The procedures are divided into ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ visual skills (Ferreira, 2002). Using the existing protocols, a comparison with existing norms is made (Buys, 2002; Buys & Ferreira, 2008). In the present study a majority of the athletes performed better in the ‘hardware’ visual skills like static visual acuity, colour discrimination, stereopsis and fusion flexibility. The athletes did not fare better in other ‘hardware’ skills like contrast sensitivity and focus flexibility. Very few of the athletes were able to score ‘above average’ and better in the ‘software’ visual skills. According to Abernethy (1986), visual performance in sport is the interaction between the ‘hardware’ and ‘software’ visual systems, and it is the ‘software’ visual system that distinguishes experts from non-experts (Ferreira, 2002; Ludeke & Ferreira, 2003; Venter & Ferreira, 2004). The ‘hardware’ of the visual system can set the potential limit to visual performance 5 in sport but once deficiencies have been addressed, it is the ‘software’ skills that will separate experts from novices (Ferreira, 2003). The ability of the sport to divide families, communities and nations along support lines tells us that there is more importance attached to the game of football than we are willing to acknowledge. Attention must therefore be paid to the performance indicators (sports vision, etc.), which have on many occasions influenced the outcomes of games. The SPSS statistical package was used to test for any statistical significance in the correlations test between player age, player position on the field of play, and player years of experience against the players’ visual skills.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uj/uj:13694 |
| Date | 14 July 2015 |
| Creators | Ramaja, Joas Ramotalane |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | University of Johannesburg |
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