There’s always been a strange secrecy surrounding injuries to players, managers often don’t have the full information or they simply don’t want to divulge it.
At Rangers, we almost seem to be harder hit than most, every generation there is a player that suffers a near career ending knee injury – Steven Gerrard has had two players (Jamie Murphy and Niko Katic) suffer this fate in just three seasons as a manager – this is nothing to do with poor training techniques, or recruitment, it’s good old fashioned bad luck.
In recent years we’ve had Mark Warburton’s management of Jordan Rossiter who was always “7-10 days” away from fitness, that his own manager made him a laughing stock rather than the subject of sympathy has always been something that irked me.
Just be honest with fans.
In Rossiter’s case, he clearly had an undiagnosed condition that was affecting his body whenever he tried to increase the intensity of his training – not every injury has to have a specific diagnosis – that he was also the subject of traumatic injuries is a moot point.
This year, fans are getting frustrated at the amount of time that Kemar Roofe and Ryan Jack are spending on the treatment table, both with calf injuries but for entirely different reasons.
Jack was never the sort of player to miss games, however, since Cedric Kipre stamped on his knee causing him to miss most of the 2017 season, he has not had the same resilience. The problem with the human body is that it tries to help itself and in Jack’s case, his calf muscles are trying to protect his dodgy knee and so they tighten up.
There is also a chicken and egg scenario where muscles become injured/tighten up because they are trying to do two things at once – move the joint from A to B but also stabilise the joint – if the ligaments and tendons aren’t capable of doing the job on their own.
Roofe is a different story, we signed him knowing that he has had problems with his calf, and that in itself has been the issue – he didn’t have a full pre-season, re-injured himself on an artificial pitch and, if you’ve been paying attention to the club’s photo gallery recently, suffered a further blow after a period where Rangers had no option but to train on their own plastic surface due to the weather – dodgy calves do not like changing playing surface.
Has Roofe been worth the risk?
Yes
No
The gaffer has said that Roofe shouldn’t be out for too long but the issue will continue to resurface if he doesn’t have a sustained period of training at an intense level, weird as it may sound, training at a higher threshold helps to build a tolerance to injuries.
Rangers have a fantastic medical team and it can’t be easy having to get players back to a stage where they are fit enough to return whilst knowing that there is a chance they could break down again, in a perfect world both players would be “cured” but, unfortunately, the best we might ever be a able to hope for is that we learn how to manage them better so that they are available more often than not.