Injuries

[norfolk white]

Not using it as an excuse, although it would be easy to do so, but it is a fact that at no point in the season did bielsa have a full squad to choose from. Bamford , apart from one game was out till November, brown, never fit, Blackman broken leg, roofe out from Xmas, he comes back for one game and is then out again, cooper out for 6 weeks, alioski, Douglas out from weeks ago for the season, Pontus has been out..... the list is endless and horrendous, how would Norwich coped with that, or Sheffield.....they couldn't....what I'm trying to get to is this.....what the hell goes on in training to get all these injuries continuously, surely someone at the club should be looking into this, and if not, why not.....its cost us dearly.

[hopelesslyoptimistic]

Hard to say Norfolk. The fitness of the players was key to how we played.

generally in modern sport the fitter, stronger and faster players are the more prone they are to suffer injuries

the collisions are harder
there is more stress on the body and whilst muscles can grow you can’t naturally make underlying joints, tendons and ligaments stronger
playing through injuries is no longer as possible
Warm up exercises and s&c is catching up with how dynamic and unforgiving on the body top level sport has become

I think it is partly down to luck and if you have a smaller squad the if luck is against you it is harder to cope. One of the plus points from Weds was how fit a lot of our players looked still bombing forward with not long to go (just need a little more wit to go with it).

if anyone hasn’t read it buy the numbers game and it will show you how much more random football is than many other team sports so picking out the precise reason why it went south can be tricky. Beware though as if you read it you won’t look at football the same way again.

[Ozwhites]

If he wants to continue playing the higher intensity pressing game, them regardless of fitness he may need to utilise a bigger squad with more rotation. Apart from the forced outs from injuries and suspensions which he had no choice in, he was very loathe to rest anyone....at all! Maybe that is why players like Hernandez, Klich etc. looked fecked over the latter stages of the season. We simply ran out of legs when it counted.