The #LUFC Breakfast Debate (Thursday 14th April)

Good Morning. It's Thursday 14th April, and here are the latest headlines from Elland Road


War of words rages on

Athletic journalist Phillip Buckingham has insinuated that Jesse Marsch comments earlier this week felt like the aftermath of a divorce, but insists he addressed an uncomfortable truth. Interestingly, the former Hull City correspondent used data collated by injury analyst expert Ben Dinnery showing that 47 per cent of absences were soft-tissue or overuse injuries. This means that just over half of Leeds injuries this season were not down to over training.

"Marsch, until now, had chosen his words carefully when discussing all he had inherited at Elland Road. There was only respect and kind words for Bielsa; he wanted to “continue his legacy” by keeping Leeds up this season. These comments felt different. They might not have been poisonous, but they were pointed. And, above all else, they addressed an uncomfortable truth".

"Leeds have encountered long and troubling injuries this season, suffering as badly as any team in all of the Premier League. Only Everton, another club that entered spring fretting about relegation, have racked up more injuries than Leeds’ 31 this season, according to figures collated by Ben Dinnery, an injury analyst at Premier Injuries".

"That is three times as many as Crystal Palace and twice as many as Wolverhampton Wanderers. Leeds’ total of 1,284 minutes missed due to injuries is unsurpassed this season, however, with 10.1 injuries occurring for every 1,000 minutes played by the team. Dinnery, perhaps most importantly, also estimates that 47 per cent of absences were soft-tissue or overuse injuries".

"The subplot to all this, of course, is the discomfort felt in criticisms levelled indirectly at Bielsa. This still feels like the aftermath of a divorce and some of the children remain deeply dissatisfied at how it came to this. To have a newcomer to the family bad mouth the one you miss — or at least, his once endearing methods — jars. Take his name out of your mouth, etc".

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Erik Ten Hag makes Phillips priority signing

Incoming Manchester United boss Erik ten Hag is understood to be plotting to capture Kalvin Phillips this Summer. The 52yo is currently contracted to Ajax whilst the formalities of a move to the red side of Manchester are worked out! He faces stiff competition from a host of European clubs including Aston Villa who, according to the Telegraph are set to offer Leeds 60m for him. Contract negotiation talks broke down earlier this month, after Phillips revealed he was binning long term agent Kevin Sharp. This has prompted new speculation that Phillips wants to be playing European football.

Phillips will not want to leave Elland Road on bad terms, but most of us can probably understand that at 26, he wants to be playing Champions League football, pitting himself against the best in the World. If Manchester Utd came along with 100m for the Yorkshire Pirlo, would you accept it?

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Who could Leeds lose this Summer

Leeds are understood to be bracing themselves for a turbulent Summer of transfer activity. After a disappointing season on the field, Leeds owner Andrea Radrizzani is expected to make wholesale changes within the ranks at Leeds Utd.

Jesse Marsch met with Victor Orta last week to discuss potential targets, to give them a head start ahead against their competitors. However, it is widely expected that certain players will leave Elland Road this Summer. Raphinha, Kalvin Phillips, Robin Koch Illan Meslier and Jack Harrison have also been linked with moves away from Elland Road, and whilst Leeds won't want to lose their best players, we know, we may have to sell, before we can buy.

Junior Firpo, Mateusz Klich and Dan James have taken the lions share of the flack from the ER faithful, but under a new Manager, can he turn things around; or are they a lost cause?

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Morning all.

Right let's get Thursday going as you've obviously all tired yourselves out debating Jesse and his big gob.

So moving on from that...not

What will happen next season when we have injuries and how will Jesse explain them away

 

Elland as you love cut and paste of everything The Athletic publish. Theres a reason I refuse to subs ribe to it and the article this morning is exactly why. Please post the Interview Phil Hay had with Rob Price where Hay was told that 70% of the injuries were done in matches, he also poured cold water on the over training situation. Rob Price is more qualified to talk about it rather than some idiot from Hull who jumps on a bandwagon. We could do with some balance on here as you seem to post more clickbait than “The Bootroom” be interested to see how Phil Hay addresses this in his podcast tomoz, because if he backs his mate up over an actual interview and praise for Rob Price….

 

Morning all,

Would hate to see Phillips playing for another PL club but if for example PSG offered £100m for him we should accept it.

That would be a good deal for him and Leeds. Replace him and strengthen other areas of the team with the money. £100m would buy four quality signings, including a left back and a striker.

 

The injuries to Cooper & Phillips (both thigh injuries) occured mid match against Brentford on 5th December. Prior to that we had a mid week game (30th Nov) against Palace in which both players played the full 90mins with no obvious on field difficulties for either.

Now I would love to hear from Rob Price about why he thinks those injuries occured. Patient confidentiality means we won't of course but what were the factors at play.

1) Both played in the Euro's so no proper summer break.
2) Shortened pre season because of Euro's.
3) More games and training during international breaks in Sept/Oct/Nov.
4) Over training so muscles fatigued.
5) Insufficient rest since previous game.
6) Red zone reached because of all of the above.

 

Jammy the same applies to every club and indeed most clubs struggled this season and Everton pretty much the same as Leeds…. But bigger squads. Yes shorter pre season, longer season, more internationals and not forgetting those clubs playing in Europe….. then look at the Championship with 2 games per week, the prem has been easy in comparison and 2 seasons under Bielsa playing twice per week and smashing it says over training is bollox

 

Let me find it. In the meantime, this is Hay's Interview with Price in 2020


No time off for Leeds players – when football returns, they’ll ‘be ready to go’

By Phil Hay
Apr 6, 2020

I catch Rob Price via video link, looking relaxed on his sofa at home. This is a rare day off for Leeds United’s head of medicine and performance, if ‘day off’ is the right way of putting it. Coronavirus has ground football to a halt but Price’s department is the nerve centre at Leeds, operating as busily as ever.

Price spends five days a week at the training ground, distancing himself from other staff as much as possible but overseeing one part of the club’s operations which cannot close down. While the game ties itself in knots over money and player wage deferrals, its medical professionals are the hidden frontline: monitoring the health of squads and coaches, controlling fitness and dietary programmes and planning for the day when clubs get permission to resume normal service.

Price is a physiotherapist with close to 20 years of continuous work in elite sport behind him but COVID-19 has taken him and his colleagues into unrecognisable territory. In the weeks before Leeds suspended collective first-team training and closed Thorp Arch to almost everyone, Price met with a virologist and an epidemiologist — an expert on the spread of diseases — to try to establish exactly what he and Leeds were dealing with. “I read about four or five new journal papers every night, just to try and keep up,” he told The Athletic. “There’s so much new information coming out about it and none of us who work in football are experts in this.”

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Rob Price putting Alberto Aquilani through his paces in a previous role with Liverpool in September 2009 (Photo: John Powell/Liverpool FC via Getty Images)

The first discussions about COVID-19 within the medical team at Leeds took place in the last week of January, long before the UK shutdown. It was apparent by then that the virus could not be contained in the Far East and that disruption to European football was possible. Price wanted Leeds to prepare contingencies and be ready for any government guidance which changed or restricted the first team’s schedule. Exercise packs were put together in advance for each player: aerobic bikes, gym balls, mats, harnesses with GPS trackers and a TRX (total resistance exercises) system to maintain upper body strength. When the decision was taken to stop training at Thorp Arch on March 17, Leeds were in a position to deliver those packs to every player’s home the same night.

“As a club we started planning really early,” Price says. “We saw the warning signs from what was happening in China and it meant that to a certain degree we were ahead of the curve when things started to change here. That made the transition much easier because it wasn’t like we flicked a switch one day and had to make plans overnight. We tried to stay a step ahead so that we weren’t hit with a sudden shutdown and unable to give the players the equipment and the help they needed.”

The management of the squad’s fitness has been tailored for two groups: those who are fit and those, like Adam Forshaw, who are recovering from injury and need face-to-face treatment. Forshaw underwent a pre-arranged bout of surgery two weeks ago — a second operation, to deal with a problem affecting his groin and hip — and is at Thorp Arch five days a week to carry out his rehab. Staff there are also working on Jean-Kevin Augustin’s sprint mechanics after his recent hamstring strain and there is another player who uses a treadmill in isolation to avoid the impact of road-running on his legs. In Forshaw’s case, his work is done one-on-one. Interaction with anyone else takes place at a distance.

Price and the physios under him have little choice but to expose themselves more than most people at the club. “It’s part of the job,” he says, “but we do everything we can to minimise the risk of the virus spreading. Thorp Arch is cleaned every day to a really high level. The players are seen by staff whose home life means they can isolate better. One of our (physio) team has a wife who’s a GP, so we’re not getting him into the building. For others it’s easier and safer to be here. And when you look at it, the risk of seeing a player on a one-to-one basis is lower than it would be on your weekly supermarket shop.”

United’s fit players are on an exercise programme which the club believe is as intense as it can possibly be given the lack of access to concerted ball work and full training sessions. There is nothing in the plan which matches the fierce, energy-sapping “murderball” games coach Marcelo Bielsa likes to stage in midweek (Mateusz Klich joked that the tedium of being stuck at home was such that he “can’t wait for Wednesdays again”) but Price sits down with fitness coaches Benoit Delaval and Ruben Crespo every Monday morning to structure the week ahead.

Championship-leading Leeds’ head of medicine and performance is involved in the Premier League doctors’ group and an EFL collective of club medical employees, groups set up to discuss best practices. Some clubs have given their players time off during the lockdown and others have scaled down fitness work significantly while they wait to see when the football will restart.

“We’ve taken the option of continuing at a high level so that when we do resume we’ll be ready to go,” Price says. “When we plan on a Monday, we’re trying to hit all the objectives we’d try to meet in a normal week. We can’t do specific football work but we do running, aerobic bike sessions, change-of-direction sessions and sprints, plus a bit of ball work. It means that their bodies should stay accustomed to the load they’ll have to do when they come back to Thorp Arch and train. I feel like the programme we’ve put in place is as good as it can be to keep them at a certain level.

“The biggest concern we’ve got is how long this might go on. How long can you maintain players working at the level we’ve got them working at? We’re waiting for guidance and it’s not our decision, but we’re preparing so that as soon as the EFL and the Football Association say ‘Go’, we’ll be ready.”

Leeds’ first-team squad and coaches have so far stayed clear of infection. Club doctor Rishi Dhand monitors their health and every player is spoken to twice a day to check for symptoms in them, family members or people they’ve come into contact with. A couple complained of minor colds and were told to isolate as a precaution. “We’ve got a very low threshold of suspicion,” Price says. “Even if someone has a cold which gets better in a day, we’ll isolate them for a full seven days to be safe.”

Players received diet plans from the club’s nutritionists and advice about the right food groups to focus on after different work-outs. Leeds put a strategy in place to supply food to any player forced to isolate indoors. “We’ve also been looking at supplementation to see if there’s anything that makes them less likely to get the virus, things that can keep their immunity high,” Price says. “You’re trying to cover any base you can.”

Diet is such a strict part of Bielsa’s thinking that players still submit weight readings every morning, via mobile phone. Weight and conditioning is a concern for clubs who no longer have their squads close at hand but Price says “healthy competition” is keeping Bielsa’s side in check; the fear of returning out of shape or of failing skinfold and body fat tests. “The players have been exceptionally good about it,” Price says. “You have to remember that two years ago they all bought into the methodology and the nutritional strategy. They know the requirements and they’re good pros. The other thing is that when you speak to the players at home, they tell you they’re bored. So actually the activities we set help them to keep on top of that.”

The EFL suspended their season on March 13, the day after Arsenal manager Mikel Arteta tested positive for COVID-19 and prompted the Premier League to announce that all games would cease. Leeds trained twice as normal at Thorp Arch in the days that followed but soon came to the conclusion that the risk of the virus spreading was too high. “Safety was paramount,” Price says, “and once the government advice changed it was as much about setting an example as anything else. It wasn’t right to carry on when we could see what was coming.”

Leeds, after three weeks, are into the flow of training from home and comfortable with their plan. What they are waiting for now is firm guidance on the timescale for matches resuming. The club have no date pencilled in for the reopening of Thorp Arch and will not set one until government rules on social contact change. The EFL has advised that players stay away from training grounds for everything but rehab sessions until April 30 at the earliest.

Price is clear that the resumption of football will need to factor in a miniature pre-season, allowing teams to get properly up to speed before playing league matches. “There’s got to be a buffer period,” he says. “The timing on that is up to the EFL and the FA but from the meetings I’ve been in, most of the clubs are asking for three or four weeks before the games start to allow you to train collectively.”

This is not entirely new ground for Price and the club. Leeds have existing virus protocols and give their players flu jabs every year, usually during the international break in October, but the scale and speed of COVID-19’s impact on football has been unprecedented. “We were as prepared as we possibly could be,” Price says. “In the meeting I had with the epidemiologist and virologist, all of their predictions were basically right. They said, ‘By next Friday football will stop, by the Friday after the schools will close and the week after that we’ll be talking about lockdown.’ It was predictable but even so, you can’t be 100 per cent ready for something like this.”

Leeds intend to make sure that when the football restarts, 100 per cent ready is what they are.

 

Afternoon all,

Phillips may leave but it won't be to the scum. Regardless of what they offer he still has to agree and I just don't see that happening.

He is Leeds through and through and I believe hates them the same way we all do.

This is not anther Smith situation where they are the only ones offering and Leeds are desperate. If he decides to leave I think he will have a host of top clubs willing to pay top dollar for him.

 

Price vows to 'push boundaries' at Leeds United

WRITTEN BY SIMON AUSTIN — AUGUST 2, 2018

ROB PRICE, Leeds United’s new Head of Medicine and Performance, says he will look to “push boundaries” at the club this season.

Price, who was appointed in June after almost six years in the same role at Hull City, is tasked with physically preparing the players for manager Marcelo Bielsa’s notoriously demanding style of play.

The Argentine likes to use a small core of players (he has already told the club that 15 can leave) and demands a high-pressing, high-octane style.

Remembering the end of the 2011/12 season, in which Bielsa’s Athletic Bilbao fell away after reaching the finals of both the Europa League and Copa del Rey, midfielder Ander Herrera said: “I can’t lie to you - in the last months we couldn’t even move.

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“Our legs said ‘stop’. To be honest, we were physically ****ed.”

Price told the Yorkshire Evening Post’s chief football writer Phil Hay that he was relishing the challenge this season though.
“The more we have players available and on the pitch, the more it’s going to help the team be successful,” he said.
"But, also, can we push boundaries? "Can we get players back fitter and can we get players back faster? Can we get them to be more robust this season to challenge in the Championship?

“There’s always a balance in the return of any player in getting them back quickly and getting them back so that injuries don’t reoccur. We’ve managed to get players back quickly and our injury rates have been low. That’s what we’re aiming for here as well.”

This is a balance that Tony Strudwick, the current Wales and former Manchester United Head of Performance, has encouraged. Speaking at TGG’s Cohesive Coaching conference, Strudwick said practitioners were putting “limitations on performance” by being more concerned about injury prevention than pushing boundaries.

Price also graduated last month from the Master of Sport Directorship course at Manchester Metropolitan University.

He explained: “Lots of people from lots of different sports were on the course, from equestrian and swimming to rugby. We visited these different places and all these sports to bring in the best ideas and practice into what we do.

“I’ve spent the last few years trying to develop my management style and myself as more of a leader, as opposed to the medical qualifications I’ve got. “At a football club it’s not just about working one-on-one. I manage a group of people and the medical department at Leeds isn’t just me. It’s lots and lots of people that work behind the scenes, with the first team, the academy and right down to the kids just coming in.

“You’re dealing with individuals, you’re dealing with players with different needs and personality styles which you’re trying to adapt to. And these days you’ve got to report upwards to the Sporting Director, the Chief Executive and the owner about what’s going on. "Your management and communication skills are important. I’m not going to be a Sporting Director, that’s not my role, but I was there to be around these people."

 

I can't get the link to work. I think it's this one that you are referring to:-

 

I think the favs now is Man City since Fernandino has decided to leave, and Jack Grealish is a big mate….

 

I'm not addressing the Marsch comments. Taken massively out of context. Too much **** stirring when relegation still hovers over the club. ****ing stop with this ****, it's divisive and unwanted.

If Man City or Liverpool came for Phillips I would understand him deciding to leave. Chelsea are in turmoil and the rest are just also rans. Villa are a sideways step at best and i just don't see Man Utd as a step up other than financially.

As for other departures? The way the squad have performed this year has almost been unforgivable at times. Lots of praise for Rodrigo recently but I won't forget the lack of effort for the first 27 games or so. I won't forget Raphinha downing tools for periods of the season either. I'd keep the core of lads who genuinely care like Ayling, Cooper, Phillips, Forshaw, Gelhardt, Meslier, Dallas, James and the rest can be replaced.

 

I've managed to lift it.


Rob Price interview: From Rafa Benitez to Marcelo Bielsa - the man charged with leading Leeds United's battle against injuries

A record is made of every injury at Leeds United and the club’s medical team have already dealt with 45 this season. Rob Price, the man who heads up the treatment room, began working as a physiotherapist at a time when relatively few people owned mobile phones. These days he works all hours, forever on call.

By Phil Hay
Tuesday, 5th February 2019, 4:06 pm

Price served Hull City, the Football Association and Rafael Benitez at Liverpool before becoming Leeds’ head of medicine and performance last summer and the suggestion that Leeds have had more than the average share of injuries on his watch is not in dispute.

“You get good and bad years,” Price says, “and if you look at our numbers then they’re high in comparison to previous years. We’ve had 45 injuries and that’s more than I’ve had in most seasons where I’ve worked in the Championship.”

At no stage has Marcelo Bielsa has a full squad to work with and on the basis that Stuart Dallas could be out for up to six weeks with a fractured ankle, it will be almost April before that happens if it happens at all.

For several months the situation has posed the question of who or what is to blame, or if in fact anything is to blame. Are clubs really this unlucky or is their management of players - on both the football and the medical side - contributing to the casualty list?

The answer, in Price’s view, is nuanced.

Football like Bielsa’s - intense, front-foot, possession-based tactics and a regime in which players have few days off, train like they play and appear for the Under-23s when they are out of the first team - comes at a physical cost and Pontus Jansson was quoted in the Swedish media yesterday as saying Leeds can find themselves feeling “tired before a match”.

But the the makeweight is a Championship table in which Leeds are joint top. There is a view amongst experienced physios that teams with no injuries are not pushing themselves hard enough.

Pontus Jansson outlines intensity of Marcelo Bielsa's Leeds United training methods

“High performance isn’t healthy,” Price says, and no-one insists on high performance more than Bielsa.

“To get the performances we’re getting and to play a high pressing, intense game, you have to be able to run, you have to be able to sprint and you have to be able to change direction,” Price says. “The more often you do that the more you’re at risk. But if you don’t do it you lose the games. It is a pay-off.

“I wasn’t here last year but if you talk to the players and talk to the staff, a very similar group of players are performing at a much higher level. That’s because of the training we do. If the downside is that you pick up a couple of extra injuries to perform at a higher level, I think it’s a price worth paying. “You could reduce injuries if you sit back and play a more negative type of football but would you be successful and would you be in the top two? The answer is probably no.”

In any case, Price would not lay the extensive injury list, a list on which only two prominent players, Gjanni Alioski and Mateusz Klich, haven’t featured, at Bielsa’s door. Clubs divide ailments into soft-tissue damage and contact injuries - a fairly clear split between those which are avoidable and those which aren’t - and of the 45 suffered by players at Leeds, more than 70 per cent have been caused by collisions.

Price says re-injury rates, where footballers aggravate an existing problem, are running at only five per cent, well below the average of 12 to 15 per cent.

Some injuries which appeared to be recurrences, like Patrick Bamford’s knee in December, were different issues. Bamford had returned early from PCL damage but was hurt again in training when another player landed on his leg.

“If you watch the video of it, he’d have injured that knee whether he’d had the injury before or not,” Price says. “He injured a different ligament. Someone fell on him, his knee twisted under him. The actual ligament he’d injured before stood up to it and was intact.

“It looks like Bamford’s injured his knee again and everyone thinks it’s the same thing but it’s not. We’re quite open and if it is the same thing then we’ll say so. The disappointing one this season was Pablo (Hernandez) who did his hamstring in September. That’s the one real re-injury we had. He did it crossing a ball in training.”

Price says that in those circumstances, he and his staff go back over the rehabilitation process and look for errors of judgement (in Hernandez’s case, the club still believe that the midfielder had cleared every necessary hurdle before resuming training). He meets up to four times a day with Leeds’ fitness coach Benoit Delaval, rehabilitation coach Ruben Crespo, head physio Henry McStay and two of McStay’s assistants to discuss the progress of injured players and the impact of their schedules.

“We do a retrospective thing where we say (about a player) ‘if you were coming back tomorrow and you were to break down, is there anything we’ve missed?’ We try to do the critical event analysis before it happens and if you tick every box and say ‘there’s nothing we would change’ you’ve reduced the risk as much as you can.

“What you’re trying to achieve is a quick return to play with a low re-injury rate. If a player is about 90 per cent and we’re ready to get them back in, if you keep them an extra three weeks in rehab then the risk of re-injury might only reduce by one per cent. So can you spot that optimum time where risk is low but you don’t prolong them coming back?

“Pat (Bamford) came back and he scored that goal at Bolton which might be enough at the end of the season. Keeping him back two weeks wouldn’t have made any difference when a player fell on him in training.”

Leeds invested in their medical team by recruiting Price from Hull and the club have modernised their equipment since then, including the purchase of a specialist machine for building up muscle strength.

Bielsa was the big acquisition on the football side, the elite coach with very pronounced plan in his head, and the Argentinian has rolled impressively with the impact of injuries during his tenure. According to Price, the medical team is never under pressure to rush players back, even though he came from Hull with a reputation for cutting down rehabilitation times.

“The best coaches, and you’ve got to put Marcelo in the best-coaches bracket, cope with whatever you give them,” Price says. “If they’re going to panic and fall off because someone breaks down with injury, they’re not going to reach the levels he’s reached.

“What he wants is certainty. If someone’s injured today, how long is he going to be out? That’s all he wants to know. There’s a pride and a drive in what you do to get players back but there’s no pressure put on by Marcelo, or the staff or the players.”

Every injury Leeds suffer is given an initial assessment by Price and another by a second member of staff. Price calls it a “four-eye review”. Scans are analysed by radiologists in Leeds and followed up by analysis by the club doctor and United’s physios.

“Every day there are two or three people asking ‘are they progressing as they should be, are they at the stage where we expect them to be. If they’re not, why not?’ What can we do that’s different?”

Price found when he spoke to Derby’s physio staff last month that injuries at Pride Park had increased from around 20 last season to more than 30 this season, despite no change in the way Derby’s treatment room works.

“You just get seasons like this,” he says. A couple of years ago Benitez made a concerted effort to cut down a problematic injury list at Newcastle United and succeeded in bringing it under control. Might Leeds attempt to do the same?

“When Rafa looked at that, they had a lot of soft tissue injuries,” Price says. “If you’re getting an overload of soft tissue injuries, there are things you can do.

“Our soft tissue injury stats are actually below average this season but you’ve seen how Marcelo prepares for technical and tactical work. He’s exactly the same with physical work and anyone who thinks he wouldn’t look at that with the same degree of introspection and detail would be crazy.”

Bielsa’s training regime will not change, just as his approach to individual games never changes. “He has his philosophy and does not let it go,” Jansson was quoted as saying. Like his tactics themselves, it is risk versus reward: constant high intensity in return for the consistently good results Leeds have been producing until recently.

“The physical stats in games are massively outweighing what we’ve achieved in the time that staff here have been collecting the data,” Price says.

“Marcelo’s a big believer that unless the players train in the week and are able to carry out the play, they’re no good to him on a Saturday anyway. They don’t want players dipping in and just turning up because they’ll be unable to perform.

“There are lots of contact injuries and people always ask ‘why is that?’ A little bit of it is that we’re more on the front foot, we’re inviting more challenges onto us and we’re making more challenges ourselves. We’re outrunning a lot of clubs and when we look at the physical stats from games, quite often - in fact in the majority of games - we’ve had a much higher physical output than the other teams.

“It’s that balance of performance, of being in the top two with the performances we’ve put on this season or having the same players as last year who perhaps weren’t training so hard and weren’t performing.

"If you want to be top of the table, you have to train hard and play hard.”

 

Agreed. It seems whenever the club appears to be moving in the right direction and all seems calm, some can’t help stirring the ****, pushing the self destruct button, and inventing issues when there are none.

It’s unnecessarily divisive.

 

Thanks Matt for digging that up and even though its from 2019 its the same issues. So we were significantly below the norm for soft tissue injuries, and with 70% of all i juries picked up in matches as collision injuries.

 

Agree it’s divisive and unwanted but he chose to bring it up by answering the question put to him the way he did. It could have been answered ver differently if you look at the actual question asked.

 

It's interested that the Athletic article states that Ben Dinnery (the injury expert) believes that Dinnery estimates that only 47 per cent of absences this season were soft-tissue or overuse injuries".

 

Only 47 percent

 

So just about half then

 

How near are you to have a full squad to pick from?

The injury issues had a lot to do with the training methodologies, the players were over-trained. That led them to being physically, mentally, psychologically and emotionally in a difficult place to recover from week-to-week and game-to-game.

More than just physical...........