Players need time to beat repeat injuries
RED RAIDER: Quade Cooper is proud of breaking his team’s record for points in Super Rugby AS perhaps the sport’s most attritional competition, it is no surprise that recurring injuries have become one of Super Rugby’s inconvenient truths.
Pierre Spies, Arno Botha, Deon Stegmann, Coenie Oosthuizen and Keven Mealamu were stricken with injuries they thought they had overcome. And other, less stellar, names have suffered, too.
“This is not an exact science. There are, however, a couple of main factors and we can look at trends,” said top sports physician Dr Jon Patricios.
Clint Readhead, senior manager of Saru’s medical division, said research up to 2012 showed recurring injuries generally don’t feature prominently in the overall tally. “[But] what is disturbing is that recurrent injuries, when they do occur, appear to be more severe. That means more time out.”
Piet Heymans, the SA Rugby Players Association chief executive, concurred. “We should not be under the illusion that the number of injuries and the severity of them will decrease. This has been a concern for some time.”
Patricios believed there were distinct reasons why there may be more recurring injuries this year. “In my experience as a team doctor, I found that injuries tend to increase the further we are away from the last World Cup,” said Patricios. “In a World Cup year, the domestic season is determined around it, so there is no end-of-year tour. Players have November off and can recover better.
“However, three seasons down the line we start seeing the cumulative effect of players having been exposed to normal seasons.”
Players are desperate to make their mark the year leading into a World Cup, and are more likely to want to play through the pain barrier. “This is when we see players masking injuries because it is a key year for them,” said Patricios.
One of the other contributing factors is coaches who want to push their best talent into action. Already, Super Rugby is bigger than it ought to be and the disparity between wellstocked teams, such as the Sharks, and the likes of the Lions, Cheetahs, the Force and Rebels, is vast.
“Another factor is the way in which players are exposed to the game,” said Patricios. “The number of playing hours has increased and there is less of an off-season, the time in which players recover.
“They are also more exposed to trauma and their recovery time is insufficient. We see this with players who go on end-ofyear Springbok tours and who don’t get the recovery time they should. They play a Currie Cup final, go on tour and return just before the start of December. That almost certainly plays a major role in the recurrence of injuries.”
He added that players’ genetic make-ups may be a factor in them being predisposed to certain injuries.
Heymans believed the muchtalked-about global season would help alleviate the problem.
“It is quite clear players don’t get enough rest and recovery. I know the International Rugby Board are busy looking at the problem. They have to start somewhere and I think if we moved the June test window to July, it would give the players proper downtime [to rest] after Super Rugby.