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You are > Home > Why are so many players getting injured nowadays?
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Wednesday, June 03, 2009
Why are so many players getting injured nowadays?
Once upon a time, players didn’t get injured as often.
Now, in all contact sports, it has become somewhat of an epidemic.
To state the obvious, and risk the wrath of many people who look after teams in a whole range of sports, there’s something radically wrong somewhere in team preparation.
Not so much that managers are not up to speed on the latest techniques and the science of sports preparation, but quite clearly, the ‘expert advice’ is very questionable.
Before one even considers that the likes of football, hurling, soccer and rugby have become more demanding in terms of fitness, despite all of sport’s modern methods, the rate of injuries has rocketed. So much so, that you’d wonder how amateur players manage to keep motivated.
If you hurt your back, pull your hamstring a few times, damage a cruciate or struggle to recover from ligament problems, you’d be thinking it’s time to say enough is enough. If you’re a paid professional, it’s a whole different ball game.
That one extra year of playing can give an athlete a comfortable lifestyle long after they retire from competitive sport.
Injuries are being diagnosed in areas of the body nowadays that were never heard of until a few years ago.
Where once players had a broken bone, modernday diagnoses reveals terms like pulls, strains, ruptures, damaged, aggravated, torn, inflammation and swelling.
Bones are not broken but chipped, double fractured or have a hairline fracture. Hamstrings aren’t pulled but strained.
While players have always been out injured after ‘doing their cruciate’, the new list of injuries includes metatarsals and the pubic bone the latter, though not that common, is widely regarded as the perfect modern-day example of a player being over exposed to training and games.
It’s not that long ago when injuries weren’t putting such a chronic strain on resources. There isn’t a county team at the moment that doesn’t go through spells where anything from five to ten players are on the treatment table.
Yet in a heavy contact sport such as rugby, where the physical element of the game has increased three-fold, the amount of players unavailable for selection through injury compared to the likes of soccer, football and hurling doesn’t appear to be any greater.
In fact, despite the outrageous demands of rugby, we see players lining out at international level into their mid-thirties. And quite often, these players play in the most demanding positions.
It’s very rare for an intercounty player to last into his mid-thirties.
The fact that there’s no closed season and the total of training sessions and games in the GAA calender is far greater in most cases to that of the rugby player is a key factor. Back in my college days, I interviewed an experienced official.
During the conversation he noted how the changes in the workplace were very significant for intercounty players.
He was of the view that up until about 20 years ago, the majority of players weren’t working in office jobs.
There were more players working in the labour industry, giving them a basic fitness level and more importantly, a constant flexing of muscles that those who weren’t working in the labour industry wouldn’t encounter.
While it’s far removed from the modern world of sports science, older folk will tell you that those who spent their summers in the bog never suffered from hamstring problems.
And daft as it may sound, when you sit back and have a think about that one, you’ll find that you can come up with a lot of examples to support it.
The official I spoke to also explained that for those players who worked in office jobs, the environment of the training session was so far removed from their day job that it made sense that the body struggled.
I remember some years ago, the Farmers Journal picked its best hurling team made up of farmers, going back to the seventies to the present day. You had the likes of Joe Cooney, John Power, Bobby Ryan, Timmy McCarthy, all of whom enjoyed long careers, relatively injury free.
I don’t recall the publication selecting a football team made up of farmers, but in recent times, John Quane of Limerick would spring to mind, yet another example of a player who enjoyed a long career along with Tomas Mannion of Galway.
The rate at which professional soccer players pick up injuries is baffling.
They are surrounded by the A to Z of modern methods.
They train for a few hours every day yet there seems to be a constant high number of players sitting out games because of a muscle strain of some sort.
The Niall Moyna’s of this world have their theories on the huge number of injuries in modern day Gaelic games.
Having listened to Moyna speak on a number of occasions, it’s hard to argue with the hard facts.
Perhaps in a world of expert this and modern that, the basics are all too often ignored.
Going from the workplace to training for many are two complete different worlds in terms of what the human body has to adjust to.
Maybe the popular training holidays of today should be replaced with a week or two in the bog or a bit of hard graft on a farm!
And finally....
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, the GAA needs to move fast and support the many players who are currently out of work.
Last week, the GPA launched a programme to try and secure employment for its members who are facing uncertain futures. According to the GPA, up to one in eight players are out of work at the moment.
It’s a sad state of affairs when the players that bring in the dough for the GAA should have to be in this situation. Would it be too much to ask for a fund to be put in place where a committee could assess the situations of these players?
I’m sure there are players out there who feel somewhat degraded playing championship games, where thousands pay at the turnstiles to see them play while they don’t know where the money is going to come from to meet the next mortgage repayment.
The Catholic Church is receiving a lot of bad press at the moment, and rightly so, in light of the fact that they are the richest institution in the country that are stalling on selling assets to boost the fund for the victims of abuse.
Let’s not forget that when it comes to worth in terms of land, the GAA is the sec-
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