Wrapping a fragile player in cotton wool breaks him faster

The instinct to protect a player prone to muscle injuries by reducing his training is understandable, and it is usually the thing that injures him.

A winger has had two hamstring problems in eighteen months. The medical staff, entirely reasonably, take him out of the sharper end of training. No sprint work on Thursday. Modified session Friday. Then he starts on Saturday and hits 34 kilometres an hour in the eleventh minute chasing a ball over the top, and something goes in the back of his leg, and everybody says he is injury-prone.

He is not injury-prone. He is under-prepared, and the preparation was removed on purpose.

Muscle tissue adapts to what it is asked to do. The hamstring at near-maximum sprinting speed is doing something quite specific, lengthening under load while decelerating the lower leg, and the only way to condition it for that is to do it. Not on a machine. Not with resistance bands. At speed, on grass, repeatedly, in the days between matches. A player who has not touched top speed since the previous weekend is being asked to go from nothing to everything in front of fifty thousand people.

So the protective instinct inverts. The safest thing you can do with a player who keeps pulling up is to expose him to high velocity in controlled doses during the week, so that match day is not the fastest he has run in seven days.

This is broadly accepted in sports science and it remains hard to implement, for reasons that are political rather than physiological. If you push a player to 95 per cent in Thursday's session and he tweaks something, that is your decision, visibly, with your name on it. If you rest him all week and he breaks on Saturday, that is bad luck. The incentives point away from the correct answer, and they point that way at every club.

The other thing the tracking data reveals, if anybody reads the right column, is that the risk clusters around change. A sudden spike in weekly load after an international break. A player returning from three weeks out and playing 80 minutes because the squad is thin. Congested fixtures where the sprint volume is high and the recovery days are gone. Injuries follow the shape of the calendar far more closely than they follow the shape of any individual player's body.

Which is why the term injury-prone irritates me. It puts the explanation inside the athlete, where it can be shrugged at, rather than in the schedule and the training plan, where somebody would have to do something about it.