LISTEN: Pitch too hard. Players don't like it. Players say that's a reason for injuries.

[daveyboy66]

How many players have played after not playing at their clubs for ages and broke down after being asked to play three matches a week...I'm thinking Flint as a prime example

[Stan Dupowls]

14 hours ago, Rodger Wylde said:

A Little Light Reading

 

It's long but pretty interesting.

Bloody hell…

after a trawl 6 hours later p244 has this;

 
Pitch construction

• Native soil natural turf pitches are generally softer, and more variable, than Hybrid counterparts.
• Hybrid natural turf pitches carried a low injury incidence but a high injury burden, compared with native soil pitches which showed high rates of injury incidence but low burdens.
• Natural turf pitches are becoming increasingly hard, a factor perceived to be a significant risk for injury.
• Key stakeholders perceived pitch hardness could significantly affect their performance and likelihood of injury, but did not perceive the need for developing good working relationships with their groundstaff.
Hard pitches
• Were perceived to affect joint soreness/pain and risk of tendon injury. They also affected the ball bounce and roll, whilst promoting quicker passing game.
• Harder pitches enabled 15% higher player speeds than soft.
• Players can achieve their maximum velocity, even when fatigued on hard, but
not soft natural turf.
244

Soft pitches
• Affect both the perceived and recorded risk of muscle/ligamentous injuries in particular.
• They produced a lower ball bounce/roll, slower game and player speeds.
• They were very fatiguing surfaces to play upon.
• The injury burden on soft natural turf (number of days missed) was nearly double that of hard pitches.

 

[Spookone]

22 hours ago, McRightSide said:

The pitch is so hard that it’s even able to injure players when we’re playing away from home 

Good Point  

[alanharper]

19 hours ago, Quickly Kevin said:

 

Haha thats right he went off injured after about 10 mins on opening day!

 

Situation is even worse than we thought, if our pitch is causing players to clash heads and get concussion in South London... 

[Jackie Sewell]

We had one of our best ever teams 1959-61. Springett, Johnson, Megson : McAnearny. Swan Kay: Wilkinson, Craig, Ellis, Fantham, Finney. That team picked itself every week. In that period I never recall any of them being injured, certainly not long term, perhaps knocks. There were no subs then. The only changes I remember were when Springett and Swan were away playing for England. And don't think that football was soft then, it wasnt. It was hard and it was fast, and training was brutal.   

[Mr. Tom]

On 18/02/2022 at 12:59, prowl said:

How is ground hard or soft? I can see solid rock might be hard and sand softer but I presume it's not solid rock.

 

[prowl]

38 minutes ago, Mr. Tom said:

 

Perfectly serious question. I can see that ground can be hard in summer, clay can get baked, sand stays soft. I've played on frozen pitches and that is nasty when you go down hard. Generally though I''ve never noticed that much difference in ground in winter when it's generally had a fair amount of rain.  Soil is either clay, sand or somewhere in the middle, if it's moist it's pretty much the same unless yo go to pure clay or pure sand. 

[sherlyegg]

17 hours ago, Basement Jack said:

No doubt in my mind it’s the pitch

Whether at Middlwood or Hillsborough 

33% injured in training

33% injured at Hillsborough

33% injured at away grounds.

 

most time is spent on the training ground by far. So you would expect the percentage would be much higher if a training ground issue.

 

away or at home same injury percentage...not Hillsborough then.

 

maybe we have a bunch of injury prone players who don't mind getting injured anywhere.

 

 

Oh..the missing 1% were injured on the crappper.

[Mr. Tom]

3 hours ago, prowl said:

Perfectly serious question. I can see that ground can be hard in summer, clay can get baked, sand stays soft. I've played on frozen pitches and that is nasty when you go down hard. Generally though I''ve never noticed that much difference in ground in winter when it's generally had a fair amount of rain.  Soil is either clay, sand or somewhere in the middle, if it's moist it's pretty much the same unless yo go to pure clay or pure sand. 

 

That makes a lot more sense than the heavily abbreviated version to be fair.

 

 

I reckon the ground at S6 always looks very clay-like, always get massive amounts of standing water around the touchlines.