Some serious questions need to be asked about our training methods and overall conditioning. Forget the fact that Remy is injury prone, we have had a catologue of injuries since Pardew arrived. Wickham played regularly before he came to us, Cabaye was rarely injured, likewise Punch, plus Sako normally played most of the season when he was at Wolves.

I actually think it is caused by our poor preparation during pre-season. We are now more concerned with money spinning opportunities by playing games in the USA in quick succession rather than concentrating on fitness, and by the time we get back to England we only play a couple of friendlies and even then first team members are missing ( made worse by our Euro players returning late ) We seem to be trying to rush and push the players too quickly after the season has started, and getting so many soft tissue injuries. If we had a more organised focused pre-season more like the one we had two years ago with the intense altitude training, it would help us immensely

Wickham had injuries spells at Sunderland, Remy had injury problems at Chelsea. Its tricky to balance, the level of fitness required to play regular competitive football is pretty high - and what can be called an injury is often something most people would call 'too serious', but the problem is, when your performing at 'a very high level' the reality is that even a dead leg often is grounds for missing a game.

Leg and groin injurys are particually troublesome, because they mean you cannot exercise at all, meaning you might only be 'injured for a few weeks' but then spend another two weeks slowly ramping up your exercise regime in training.

Where as if you or I miss a week down the gym (hahhahahah) we can step back in and only notice its a bit more than usual. For an athlete a week without training can be two to three weeks to get fully back to full activity

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There is clearly a problem with injuries. Whether that's the surface or the methods we can't know as we don't work for the club. Last season we saw nearly our entire spine of the team out at some point. Something needs to change as we can't afford to miss our best players.

They use one of the Toilet Cubicles and a bag of frozen peas at Beckenham apparently!!

These two tables suggest we are pretty average when it comes to injuries in premier league

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Edited by tshepp897 (08 Sep 2016 2.55pm)

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