Interesting article as usual Prof. I have a doubt. Why did you consider only muscle injuries for the analysis? And what constitutes muscle injuries? I'm guessing you addressed these 2 questions previously and I missed them. If so, could you please direct me to those articles? Cheers!
I focused on only muscle injuries because that's the injury type most associated with intensity, i.e. to address the question of whether intensity of play style and training is causing the issues. I gleaned the muscle injury data from Premier League Injuries (https://www.premierinjuries.com/injury-table.php) and looked through each injury description for every injured player in the league. If the injury was a muscle injury then I counted it for that category. Hamstring injuries, for example, will be listed as 'thigh injury.'
Thanks for the article! I was wondering whether just counting injuries discretely, rather than minutes missed (which would bring in severity of the injuries), as well as simply looking at count of games played, rather than a ratio of games per week, does less to highlight how Spurs have been impacted by injuries?
Maybe doing that better serves a different question to the one you were answering (to something like, how does the severity of injuries change with fixture congestion).
I'm also wondering what it would look like to plot the count of injuries (missing players) for each team over time - maybe even expanding the sample of teams to include other leagues? But you might have already done something like that.
Another issue is how many of these injuries occurred in a competitive game and how many happened in training sessions. The intensity of the latter have been cited as a significant source of the problem.
Athletic published an article about training intensity.
“Geoff Scott (head of medicine and sports science ) left Spurs after clashing with Postecoglou. Sources with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, say that the pair fell out over how to manage the first-team squad’s workload and the recovery of injured players.”
Spin it any way you want, but the issue of training intensity as a source of injuries IS being talked about and has happened at Postecoglou’s previous clubs.
It's funny how you continue to dig up past articles that print opinions of people that are no longer working at the club yet you choose to ignore the words of the manager and some players that say the opposite.
You can find players like Maddison and Deki saying in interviews that they're only recovering and playing every 3 days is difficult, we only have 10 first team players fit etc but you choose to take the opinion of others as facts.
We have an abundance of information on this topic from simple things like people within the club stating they're not able to train.
There's the basic logic that in extreme cases the team would only have 48 hrs between games up to a maximum of 4 days with the average being 3 days to recover. If you consider a player has just finished playing a game, you give them a day off, the following day is used for recovery, and then IF a third day is available to train you're suggesting that they would train "intensely" the day before a game. To what end? If they do that they will be going into the next game over fatigued... There's simply no logic in that.
Additionally, anyone who has suffered a significant injury knows that the likelihood of re-injury is extremely high even once fully recovered. We also know from research within the football space that 3 days is not enough time for the hamstrings to recover post game.
Then we have players like Deki, Porro, and Gray who are well documented commensurate professionals and top level trainers that are able to manage playing every 3 days a week albeit with a notable reduction to the quality of their on field performance.
In your last sentence you say you can "spin it any way you want" which is so ironic because you choose only to see the information you want to see, believe the opinions of those that share your views, and ignore the words of club staff and basic logics/facts.
This just stinks of someone who is pushing their own agenda using confirmation bias.
Another great post
Interesting article as usual Prof. I have a doubt. Why did you consider only muscle injuries for the analysis? And what constitutes muscle injuries? I'm guessing you addressed these 2 questions previously and I missed them. If so, could you please direct me to those articles? Cheers!
I focused on only muscle injuries because that's the injury type most associated with intensity, i.e. to address the question of whether intensity of play style and training is causing the issues. I gleaned the muscle injury data from Premier League Injuries (https://www.premierinjuries.com/injury-table.php) and looked through each injury description for every injured player in the league. If the injury was a muscle injury then I counted it for that category. Hamstring injuries, for example, will be listed as 'thigh injury.'
Ok cool 👍
This channel is great.
Thanks!
Thanks for the article! I was wondering whether just counting injuries discretely, rather than minutes missed (which would bring in severity of the injuries), as well as simply looking at count of games played, rather than a ratio of games per week, does less to highlight how Spurs have been impacted by injuries?
Maybe doing that better serves a different question to the one you were answering (to something like, how does the severity of injuries change with fixture congestion).
I'm also wondering what it would look like to plot the count of injuries (missing players) for each team over time - maybe even expanding the sample of teams to include other leagues? But you might have already done something like that.
Interesting piece of analysis. Let’s hope for some reversion to the mean going forward.
Another issue is how many of these injuries occurred in a competitive game and how many happened in training sessions. The intensity of the latter have been cited as a significant source of the problem.
Have been cited by whom? Ange has been pretty clear that they've not been training for months due to match schedule and fatigue.
Ben Davies injured in training
https://www.tottenhamhotspurnews.com/news/ben-davies-injury-setback-emerges-ahead-of-tottenham-v-wolves/
Former scout questions training methods
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/health/other/what-is-happening-in-training-ex-scout-questions-tottenham-injury-list-as-ben-davies-suffers-hamstring-injury/ar-AA1vu1sx#
Athletic published an article about training intensity.
“Geoff Scott (head of medicine and sports science ) left Spurs after clashing with Postecoglou. Sources with knowledge of the situation, who asked to remain anonymous to protect relationships, say that the pair fell out over how to manage the first-team squad’s workload and the recovery of injured players.”
https://archive.ph/GyuX9
Spin it any way you want, but the issue of training intensity as a source of injuries IS being talked about and has happened at Postecoglou’s previous clubs.
It's funny how you continue to dig up past articles that print opinions of people that are no longer working at the club yet you choose to ignore the words of the manager and some players that say the opposite.
You can find players like Maddison and Deki saying in interviews that they're only recovering and playing every 3 days is difficult, we only have 10 first team players fit etc but you choose to take the opinion of others as facts.
We have an abundance of information on this topic from simple things like people within the club stating they're not able to train.
There's the basic logic that in extreme cases the team would only have 48 hrs between games up to a maximum of 4 days with the average being 3 days to recover. If you consider a player has just finished playing a game, you give them a day off, the following day is used for recovery, and then IF a third day is available to train you're suggesting that they would train "intensely" the day before a game. To what end? If they do that they will be going into the next game over fatigued... There's simply no logic in that.
Additionally, anyone who has suffered a significant injury knows that the likelihood of re-injury is extremely high even once fully recovered. We also know from research within the football space that 3 days is not enough time for the hamstrings to recover post game.
Then we have players like Deki, Porro, and Gray who are well documented commensurate professionals and top level trainers that are able to manage playing every 3 days a week albeit with a notable reduction to the quality of their on field performance.
In your last sentence you say you can "spin it any way you want" which is so ironic because you choose only to see the information you want to see, believe the opinions of those that share your views, and ignore the words of club staff and basic logics/facts.
This just stinks of someone who is pushing their own agenda using confirmation bias.
Sky Sports reports Solanke is injured in training on January 19.
https://www.skysports.com/football/news/11095/13292038/dominic-solanke-suffers-knee-injury-as-tottenhams-injury-crisis-worsens
Paul O’Keefe (via hotspurhq) reports that Sarr is injured in training on January 22.
https://hotspurhq.com/tottenham-suffer-yet-another-injury-blow-midfielder-leaves-training-early
Plus the Sarr news was a knock... That's all that was said.
Yes, that was a freak knee injury that happened during finishing practice, nothing to do with training intensity nor muscle.
It's been covered at length that they don't train whilst playing every 3 days. Thus training intensity is not a factor.