Hodgson’s scan ‘nightmares’ and why Crystal Palace might have so many hamstring injuri

Hodgson’s scan ‘nightmares’ and why Crystal Palace might have so many hamstring injuri

Roy Hodgson walked in to conduct his pre-match media duties, scrabbled around in his tracksuit pocket and produced a piece of paper.

“It’s our injury list,” he said as he unfolded the A4 sheet. “There are so many at the moment that I forget. It’s just in case I had forgotten.”

That list extends to double figures.

Crystal Palace manager Hodgson was in a downbeat mood throughout his 27-minute press conference, and with good reason. Understandably, there was frustration over the hand he has been dealt, at this unprecedented number of injuries.

He will only just be able to put together a full complement of senior starters against visitors Nottingham Forest on Saturday, with a substitutes’ bench consisting largely of youngsters. The injury crisis is one Hodgson believes is one of the most significant of his career, which will have spanned 400 Premier League games come kick-off at Selhurst Park tomorrow.
Palace are still reeling from the loss of Eberechi Eze, who Hodgson expects to be out for six weeks, with their manager saying he has come to dread his injured players going for scans.

“I have got to say that one of the words that cause me nightmares these days is the word ‘scan’,” he said, “because every scan now seems to involve a tendon and when that is the case, what used to be a one or two-week break from football suddenly becomes a six-week break from football.”

Cheick Doucoure has a hamstring problem, and Hodgson says he is a doubt for the Forest game, making him the seventh player in his squad currently affected by that particular issue, with varying degrees of seriousness.

Joel Ward will also miss out with a groin issue. Odsonne Edouard has returned to fitness after his own hamstring injury, but in ordinary circumstances would not be considered for this match. None of the other names on Hodgson’s piece of paper have recovered sufficiently to be up for selection

When Eze pulled up in training this week, there must have been a collective groan among his team-mates and Hodgson’s coaching staff. The Palace squad, already painfully thin, has been stretched to breaking point.

Hodgson described the damage to Eze’s hamstring as “serious”. There is some fortune that his anticipated absence includes the two-week international break that begins after Sunday’s fixtures, but that is scant comfort to Hodgson who will have to contend with the absence of another of his two key attacking players. The other, Michael Olise, remains absent with his own hamstring injury, originally sustained in July. He suffered a relapse last month and is yet to rejoin team training.

“Two of our most creative players we are going to have to wait on for a period of time, and it could even be a considerable period of time,” Hodgson said. “So we are going to be dependent now on the players coming into their places to do such a good job — and to be fair, they have been doing that.”

Hodgson says he has nightmares about scans for injured players (Dan Mullan/Getty Images)
Some of these injuries have been sustained away from the club.

Jefferson Lerma was with Colombia during the previous international break when he got injured, and has not featured since. The hope is he will return to training in the second week of this international break and potentially be available for the trip to Newcastle United when Palace’s season resumes on October 21, or, more likely, the home game against Tottenham Hotspur six days later. Olise suffered his playing for France at the European Under-21 Championship.

Edouard, Naouirou Ahamada and Nathan Ferguson, who returned to match action with the club’s under-21s side recently, have all endured hamstring issues of late. Such strains, tears and pulls are common, but there are various possible reasons Palace have been struck with so many relative of them to the size of their squad.

Palace have used the fewest players in the Premier League this season (18). Next opponents Forest, in contrast, have used 25, which is the joint-most, alongside Sheffield United and Manchester United. The demands placed on those regular Palace starters are greater as a result of the absence of options.

Crystal Palace

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Luke Anthony, clinical director at the GoPerform injury treatment centre, former head of sports medicine at EFL club Reading and injury prevention specialist at Norwich City of the Championship, says the demands on players have increased and are a major factor in them landing in the treatment room.

“The rate of injuries has not improved in the last 10 years of Premier League football,” Anthony tells The Athletic. “The reason we think the rate is staying the same is because of the intensity of the numbers of football — the amount of high-speed running distance covered, the amount of sprints, the number of sprints covered in a game, the speed of those top speeds.

“Particularly when we talk about hamstrings; high-speed running, high speed, running distance, sprint speed and the number of sprints are the things that put hamstrings under the most pressure.

“The other aspect to it is an overload. We would talk about these three aspects of training. You would look at the duration, intensity and frequency of training. It can happen in training, but the majority of these injuries are match-related.

“The problem of having a small squad is that if you (a player) have a niggle and you become fatigued, have tightness in a muscle or a very low-level injury in a muscle which would recover in five or six days then normally, if you’ve got a big enough squad, you can take (the player) out and just miss a game or a week of training.

“But when you’ve got a tight squad, there’s more pressure to play with the niggle. When you don’t have enough time to recover from a minor injury, this is when you develop your risk over a period of time.”

Anthony also cautions that proper recovery plays a major part in injury prevention.

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“If you get training load wrong, with too much volume, intensity or too high frequency, with insufficient recovery in between, you increase the risk of that player having an injury. The hamstring is particularly vulnerable with regards to those running overloads.”

Palace’s squad was already short on experience, with Luka Milivojevic and James McArthur having departed when their contracts expired in the summer, but Hodgson now has even fewer senior options to call upon from the bench. That, he says, is worrying.

“It’s not the XI that I put out onto the field that concerns me as much as the fact that we don’t have anybody really senior on the bench that can help us out as the game goes on,” he added.

“We had three goalkeepers and 22 outfield players. But of that 22, there were four or five players who have either come up from the academy or are youngsters who are untried and not fully tested. So our squad had been quite a tight one. To lose that many players from that, we’re not the only team in the league to have a good few injuries but some of them have got a few more senior players to call on.”

With this injury crisis showing few signs of abating, Palace will have to contend with an extremely stretched squad — and will desperately hope everyone comes through this weekend unscathed.