Is Liverpool injury ‘curse’ all part of the grand plan?
Jurgen laments absentee list but his technical gurus say it’s vital to protect players at start of congested season
IN Jurgen Klopp’s mind, it felt like sorcery. He thought he had a witch in the building. A hoodoo, surely.
The Liverpool boss had a Premier League match at Crystal Palace to prepare for but, every day, another member of his already depleted squad fell away.
Some, of course, he knew about. Ibrahima Konate suffered a knee injury in pre-season. Thiago and Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain were all sidelined before the campaign kicked off. Diogo Jota tweaked an old hamstring injury in Thailand.
And then came the others. Joel Matip sat out training on the Friday before the Crystal Palace game with a groin problem. Joe Gomez was only fit enough to be a substitute. Same for Jordan Henderson. Roberto Firmino couldn’t even make the bench.
A week later, with a trip to Old Trafford tomorrow, Firmino is fit and available. Henderson is fine. Klopp says Joe Gomez will start. He’s even welcomed Naby Keita back. There’s still a bunch of others out but he must feel as though the curse has lifted slightly.
The Reds are not the only club feeling the pain. Liverpool’s neighbours Everton are without seven key players, including Dominic Calvert-Lewin and Abdoulaye Doucoure. Leeds, too, have started the season without several crucial names while Patrick Bamford limped off with an injury last weekend.
We’re only two games in and treatment rooms are packed. Much of it, say the experts, is down to the schedule. Last season finished late, this one started early. Throw in those lucrative pre-season tours around the globe and, before you know it, issues arise.
Zone7 technology, created by the artificial intelligence company based in Silicon Valley, is used by clubs including Liverpool, Leeds, Rangers and Hull to track thefitness of their players. They access data from thousands of previous injuries to predict when theyare likely to occur and so prevent them.
‘More clubs competed late into May last season than usual, across both regular-season and European tournament fixtures,’ Zone7 performance director Rich Buchanan told The Mail on Sunday.
‘This means more players started pre-season training later due to the need for sufficient mental and physical rest. This has condensed the pre-season period for many due to scheduling challenges this season.
The short pre-season has led to players generally having less time to build tolerance for the physical demands required at the highest levels of club football. This impact was further compounded by the UEFA European Championship being hosted last summer.
‘Another factor is the commercially driven and far-flung pre-season programmes, which have seen a resurgence following the Covidinduced hiatus and further exacerbated the reduced training time. Players have spent significant time travelling across several time zones and competing in different conditions. This, in turn, has hindered their ability to recover from circadian rhythm (body clock) disruptions and benefit from training exposure and rhythm.
‘This flurry of injuries, however, is likely not a new phenomenon. We typically see a spike in injury risk at the start of the competitive season. To mitigate that, clubs will try to manage individual players’ workload while simultaneously balancing the demands of the schedule and training needs of the team.’
Liverpool came into the season on the back of a campaign that saw them fight, to the end, in all four competitions — and with a core group of players.
Last season, in the Premier League, they had nine outfield players rack up at least 2,300 minutes. No other club had more than seven. All the other Big Six clubs had five, except Chelsea, who had three.
Eight of those nine outfield players started at least 40 games in all competitions. The only one who didn’t, Jota, started 39. Virgil van Dijk started 51.
‘Just what did last season’s push to try to secure four trophies take out of the players,’ asks Ben Dinnery, injury analyst at Premier Injuries. ‘The physical demands of putting your body through that two or three times a week has had an impact, and we are seeing slightly jaded players starting the season. They finished the season late, started this one a bit early, and you had those Nations League games in between. It’s not just the physical demands but the psychological effort to prepare yourself.’
Dinnery has a theory, though. Premier Injuries analysis of Liverpool’s injury data over the
past few seasons shows, by and large, their players are not out for too long. And it’s because of this that such a large group of players could feature so frequently.
In the 2019-20 and 2020-21 seasons, around 77-78 per cent of Liverpool’s injured players returned in five games or fewer. Last season, their first using Zone7 technology to spot injury patterns and predict when problems will arise, saw that jump to 86 per cent.
Last season, Liverpool’s injured players returned to action on average in 26.4 days. The figure for the season before was 42.5, though this included long-term injuries to Virgil van Dijk, Joe Gomez and Joel Matip. Even so, the season before that was still at 31.5 days.
Zone7’s technology analyses everything from match and training data to a player’s strength, sleep and stress levels to flag up when they are at risk. When they are, it pings on an app with Liverpool’s staff, either Klopp or Dr Andreas Schlumberger, the club’s head of recovery and performance — and a decision has to be made. Is it better, then, for Gomez to start on the bench against Palace so he can start at Old Trafford in peak condition?
Dinnery thinks, with the rise of this kind of technology, we could see a rise in the number of injuries, with more players missing games, but they will return much quicker. Miss the odd game here instead of the risk of missing six, seven or eight down the line.
‘These are Premier League veterans — it’s not just a couple of people from Silicon Valley running around with spreadsheets,’ Zone7 founder Tal Brown told the Daily Telegraph in May.
Last season, Liverpool reported 39 injuries and lost 968 days, down on the previous campaign’s total of 1,722. Newcastle, meanwhile, had 29 injuries but lost 1,168 days.
In a season such as this, Champions League fixtures soon to be every week, and a World Cup in the winter, when clubs usually see spikes in injuries, managing players and their fitness has rarely been so crucial.
Last week, for Klopp, it may have felt like a curse. In the long run, the hope is it should be a blessing.