They say injuries mean nothing but for a club like ours in the current position it is in, losing players means an awful lot. This club is trying it's best to not only build a strong squad, but the depth to cover it as well.
- Only 2 players are so far looking to participate in every AFL match this season (Patrick Cripps and Sam Petrevski-Seton).
- Give or take the 3 suspensions (Ed Curnow, Dale Thomas and Jed Lamb), an average of 11 players were unable to be selected on a weekly basis. That's a quarter of the list.
- There have been around 39 instances of a player succumbing to injury during a match (13 of them from the VFL).
- Carlton lead the injury table with 185 games missed from injured players. A guaranteed 49 over the next five weeks takes the total to an alarming 234. It can only go up from there.
- 5 of the seven players out for the rest of the season are known to play in the backline (Sam Docherty, Liam Jones, Lachie Plowman, Alex Silvagni and Tom Williamson). Adding to that, Ciaran Byrne, Harrison Macreadie, Caleb Marchbank and Jesse Glass-McCasker have all missed huge chunks of the year. Add all the games these lot have missed, that's just about equal to 115. Almost half of the minimum total (234).
- This has led to approximately 17 players rotating through defense.
- 6 instances when a player has re-aggravated the same injury they were coming off from (Matthew Kennedy - ankle, Matthew Kreuzer - groin, Marc Murphy - plantar fascia, Tom Williamson - back, Alex Silvagni - Achilles and Harrison Macreadie - Hamstring). This supported by the suspended fine of $20,000 handed down to the club after they failed to diagnose Cameron Polson for concussion in round 14, should see the medical doctors at the club come under some form of scrutiny.
It's not about who is out, but how many. It strips the team of flexibility and the chance to select players on the back of form (as not much comes through the VFL side).
There are many reasons for the team's woes, the shallow midfield, the game mentality, the zone defense (which I despise), etc. But anyone that refuses to accept the toll injuries have had on the club are only informing to others they're aren't fit to be hanging around on this thread.