Monday, October 06, 2008

Injuries out of control

At the moment it seems like a lot of teams are suffering from lots of injuries. For example Galatasary had officially 13 players injured before the Bursaspor match on Sunday. These were:

1. Emre Gungor
2. Ugur Ucar
3. Tobias Linderoth
4. Aydin Yilmaz
5. Baris Ozbek
6. Hasan Sas
7. Mehmet Topal
8. Harry Kewell
9. Sabri Sarioglu
10. Arda Turan
11. Serkan Calik
12. Umit Karan
13. Orkun Usak


Now of those Emre Gungor and Serkan Calik are long term injuries, Ugur has been out for a while, Linderoth seems to be permanently injured and Orkun Usak is a goalkeeper so is he really missed as Aykut and De Sanctis are not injured.

Funnily enough Arda and Sabri played on Sunday but neither of them looked as sharp as normal.

If you look at other teams around Europe you will see similar stories at some clubs and no injuries at others. Are these level of injuries only to be found at clubs with a lot of international players who thanks to Blatters insatiable greed and complete disregard for player fitness has the FIFA and UEFA treadmill at full throttle these days. Are the injuries a result of poor conditioning, poor nutrition, just bad luck or is it beacuse of the demands of the modern game, its speed and physicality.

Are Turkish teams less professional than other teams, I mean even at Euro 2008 they seemed incapable of rehabilitating players quickly unlike other countries.

For example Bolton Wanderes, not excatly a rich club, have conditioning coach, a nutrisionist, force players to undergo ice baths after matches to speed recovery and are able to recover players very quickly it seems. Do Galatasaray I wonder have similar facilities or even care about them?

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