The Mikel Merigol's Footboned Injury Thread: Page 170 - The Arsenal discussion forum and community: One more in the Tolly

The Mikel Merigol's Footboned Injury Thread

Tam

Another Arteta masterclass in overplaying players.

Now Saliba looks as if he's suffering from being one of the few core players tasked with holding the team up all season.

(sarcasm)

daredevil

Not this overplaying nonsense again.

Burnwinter

awooga83 That's why trophies shine I guess, reflects all the glare. Just look at City setting up a trophy mausoleum bathed in an array of soft lights for Guardiola, something like the tomb of Tut now his reign as Pharaoh has ended and the 115 prophesied signs of plague are returning to their lands.

Meatwad

back injuries in athletes are usually managed, surgery isn't talked about so casually. failed back surgery syndrome is a real thing.

Sicario2

This is good for us, both our first choice full backs will have the summer off

JazzG

Didn’t some palace fan say last summer that this guy would cause a lot of injuries in our squad?

Meatwad

Former Olympic sprinter the front-runner to be new Arsenal doctor

and one of the first reactions on villa talk:
"Given the injuries we get, that's probably not a disaster 😂"

maybe no matter who you hire, there will be fans talking about their own club's injury problems and saying similar things.

Sicario2

Meatwad Villa suffered one of the lowest injury records last season I welcome this appointment

Meatwad

Sicario2
by what measure? you see all kinds of lists: minutes lost, total injuries (basically 2 acl's could ruin you in a minutes lost list but that doesn't reflect negatively on the staff IMO), etc.

Dom

The doctor situation at Premier League clubs is pretty chaotic. Some clubs have head doctors/head of medicine that were bog standard physios who schmoozed or impressed their way to top jobs despite not working in clinical before, others are seasoned SAS doctors who fancied a change and probably took a pay cut for a less stressful job and the rest seem to be a mixture of ex-consultants or all-rounders who once contributed to a novel study on hamstrings or regenerative power of radish juice or something.

Despite the enormous wealth of the league, it feels like the Wild West with each team having a different philosophy towards player health.

I won’t read anything into this ex-Villa doctor having a “great” record. Emery seems to rotate his team more than Arteta and it’ll be interesting to see if there’s a real change of philosophy on load management if we aren’t running away with the league.

Burnwinter

I think a lot of this has got to have to do with player and coach trust. The coach is asking the doctor each week if a given player could be sent out to play, and the player is asking the doctor each week if he should be sent out to play. Every injury that sets back results will corrode the coach's trust, every injury that sets back a player's career will corrode the player's trust.

Sounds to me like you'll always have a vulnerable life as a club doctor or another ancillary football professional who gets posed these fundamentally unanswerable questions … you're employed more or less as a priest, mystic or guru occupying the role of Rick Rubin helping a band record an album, or maybe Rick Rubin's personal assistant if the coach is more like Rubin.

The band are going to hate each other half of the time and hate the pain of songwriting and recording the other half of the time, and over time it's almost guaranteed they'll eventually turn on you. No doubt the record company's A&R people and owners are all quite pleased you're there to take the blame.

For a club doctor I'm sure it helps if you can look and act the part by being a former Olympian sprinter. That way the coach knows you've pushed your own body above and beyond its humane limits, and the players know you once experienced injuries that set back your own career. Similar to the way Rubin garners credibility by wearing that Rasputinesque beard that screams "I'm really creative!" …

Dom

Burnwinter Sounds to me like you'll always have a vulnerable life as a club doctor or another ancillary football professional who gets posed these fundamentally unanswerable questions … you're employed more or less as a priest, mystic or guru occupying the role of Rick Rubin helping a band record an album, or maybe Rick Rubin's personal assistant if the coach is more like Rubin.

That's a good summary. Theoretically there should not be a need to replace a highly qualified and experienced head of medicine at the club unless they have interpersonal issues with other staff. Or if a club wants a doctor with better connections to labs trafficking PEDs. All specialist treatments and specialist rehab are carried out by private medical institutions anyway.

Some new hotshot promising 50% reduction in recovery time and 20% increase in stamina through novel exercise methods and """sports medicine""" is likely going to have quack tendencies or be a cheat. There are plenty of them around. Not saying Arsenal's new doctor is that, but I hope he wasn't hired on the basis of promising a new wonder medicine. Non-medical laypeople at sports teams make big medical decisions which I always found odd.

Klaus

Consider these two axioms:

1) The main tactical evolution of the past 20 years has not been possession-based short passing, nor the eradication of free roles (libero, second striker) in favour of positional specialists (defensive mids, playmakers), but the way teams press as a unit off the ball.

2) A modern footballer performs double the amount of high-intensity sprints during a game compared to the 90s.

The main takeaway is that modern football breaks players, not through an added number of minutes (they play less today than they did 20 years ago due to increased squad sizes) but through higher athletic demands. Which means those big talents who are injury prone to begin with have no hope to make a serious mark in the game nowadays (like Isak or Schick). And many of those who aren't injury prone will break down eventually anyway because they play virtually all the minutes (like Saka).

What you're left with is a very small group of players in the world who are elite genetic specimen with a good injury fortune during their formative years, and they will play 600-800 games in a career without picking up any significant injuries. Find the best of those guys and build the spine around them. The others you have to cycle through every 3-4 years. Sacking doctors is just rearranging the deck chairs on Titanic in the final analysis. I doubt it has any impact whatsoever unless you've hired a particularly incompetent person.

Claudius

Klaus both are happening Klaus. They’re playing more and dealing with more intensity. We are going to wring them like a dish cloth.

Klaus

Claudius They're basically playing the same number of games now compared to twenty years ago. In terms of minutes they're playing much less - generally - because we have bigger squads and more substitutions are alllowed. It's not the games, it's the intensity.

MistaT

Klaus — aren’t we all talking in the other thread about how many games international players now play?

My sense is that yes in the leagues the number of games may be similar (including cups), but there must be added games between Champions League and international games.

Burnwinter

Klaus It's not the games, it's the intensity.

There was an interesting tidbit last preseason where Arteta revealed we have a system of getting the players to replicate the specific and most intense biomechanics of real matches in training—adrenalin-fuelled sprints and last-ditch lunges, full contact collisions—so as to develop any kind of meaningful injury-preventive muscle memory. But also that the system despite its supposed benefits doesn't work so well, as it both leads to more training injuries and doesn't achieve the sheer derangement of match day efforts.

Put succinctly, you're right: modern football is an injury factory and the clubs, technical staff and players are all used to this fact.

Klaus

MistaT They're playing perhaps twice as many international games today, but whether you rack up 150 or 80 caps over a 10-12-year national team career is not really that important. It's a few hundred more international minutes per season while most footballers are playing a thousand club minutes less than a decade back. International football is also less intense.

Someone looked at Real Madrid in 2006 compared to 2026: they had two players who played more than 4000 minutes this year. In 2006 they had 7 I think.

The trend tracks for Arsenal too: Vieira played something like 63 games in 2002. And he wasn't substituted in most of those games because you could only bring on three guys from a bench of five. We didn't even have a central mid among the subs half of the time unless it was an inbetweeny guy who could be an emergency solution for several positions. In 2006 we had two centrebacks injured and Gilberto had to play in the defence for like three months. There was no depth.

Meatwad

4000 minutes in 2006 isn't equal to 4000 minutes in 2026. the intensity is much higher. i got use to watching a lot of old games during our barren spell. it's like a different game. what we thought was blood and thunder back then is pretty pedestrian now.

Klaus

Meatwad 4000 minutes in 2006 isn't equal to 4000 minutes in 2026. the intensity is much higher.

Yep, that is my whole point. They play fewer minutes today but the intensity is higher so they get injured anyway. There are a lot of players from the late 90s who wouldn't have been elite footballers in 2026.

Coombs

Klaus it's true, but the fitness demands have risen in accordance with other factors. Increase in support for top level players across the board physically, financially, mentally, and in just the general comforts of daily life. The pain is still owed, though, and the body keeps the score.

« Previous Page Next Page »