In The Age this morning, Peter Brukner put our injuries down to a combination of bad luck and a lack of time to condition players for the new game style. I'm willing to subscribe to this theory.
Sam Lonergan would never have played football at this intensity, and with the nature of the game today, he's had to step in to a big role within our midfield rotations. In the past, even last year, young players were eased into the rotations far more. Leroy Jetta and Courtenay Dempsey, no matter how much pre-season training, are now filling roles far and beyond those that they've ever filled before as well.
It's unclear whether or not those 19-20 year old bodies were ever going to be ready to step into roles with such enormous fitness demands. With so much more extra stress, sensitives muscles like hamstrings and groins are going to be affected.
The Gumbleton and McVeigh injuries I'm willing to put down to bad luck. I'll believe the coaching staff that Gumby was right to go, and as sometimes happens with 19 year old kids, they leap for a ball and it simply goes. They had tapered his training load all pre-season, and it wasn't through excessive work rate in the match. In addition to this, I don't subscribe to the theory that it was a 'flow on' from other injuries, as if I recall correctly, the hamstring, or at least the part of the hamstring, hadn't been torn before. I believe the McVeigh injury was one of those that just happen.
As for David Myers, I think it's a flow on effect from last year. The amount of football that young guys play in their penultimate year of junior football is insane, beyond the amount that AFL players play. The amount of rest a lot of those guys get is minimal, as they constantly strive to catch the eye of recruiters. It's not that uncommon for first year players to have injury concerns such as David's. I wouldn't have said the club rushed him, and the time he's spent out in recent weeks seems to have been precautionary.
The injuries to Andrew Welsh, Matthew Lloyd, Adam McPhee and Heath Hocking are the most disappointing to me. These were guys that weren't managing the training load, and yet were still playing and training at a level incurring stress on their bodies. Lloyd and McPhee were raked in before it was too late, but Welsh and Hocking fell through the cracks and have each suffered in the early part of the season because of this.