Can anyone explain to me the reason why we continue to play players who are injured? Sure, every player has a niggle, but when it comes to a groin injury dating back to the pre-season no wonder Joe Daniher is playing well below his best. Only now we are told when the season is just about had it for Essendon. For the last couple of weeks Tippa has been running out with his knee bandaged. l
Last week against Hawthorn, his whole knee was encapsulated in a knee bandage, No wonder it isn’t the Tippa of 2017 running around this year. Playing injured players is like starting the game with 20 fit players instead of 22. Who is to blame - the coaches the doctors or even the players? Time and time again it has been proven that injured stars are not supermen. They are only human and injury, no matter how good one may be, injuries just allow players to perform at their best. Hence, the side is disadvantaged, supporters are annoyed the side isn’t winning and finals are unachievable.
So our team to play Carlton:
B. Saad Hurley Ambrose
HB. McGrath Hooker McKenna
C. Mutch Goddard Zaharakis
HF. Laverde Stewart Smith
F. Fantasia Stringer McKernan
R. Bellchambers Heppell Z.Merrett
INT. Parish Langford Clarke McNeice
If a guy isn’t 95% + dunno why you’d play them.
This isn’t pre-2000s where you could perhaps hide someone a bit who was NQR.
Side doesn’t look (comparatively) too bad, although I’d like to see someone with a bit more leg speed in the F50.
Coming off an injury I can see Fantasia getting blow up trying to chase for Smack, Stewart etc which ironically would then increase his risk of getting injured
Or if they do it blows up in their faces eg Sloane and Walker at Adelaide this year, Cameron at GWS this year, Fyfe and his leg at Freo, Sydney 2016 Grand Final
They do. And it’s a risk-reward decision. But it also depends on the injury. Some you can play with, and others you don’t. Sounds like this is one you should not play with. At least, once you saw it was not fixed you had to back off. And that was obvious early on.
2001 Grand Final we went in with injured/underdone players. Hird, Mercuri, Blumfield, Heffernan IIRC. We’ve been doing it for years and it just doesn’t work…
I’m not an expert on the matter but I’m also not under the assumption that the club would risk our best player either.
Some pretty outlandish things being said about the club at the moment and I find it hard to believe that they would make misinformed decisions with the resources they have at hand.
Given how clubs are not transparent about injuries we’ll never really know what happened.
But mistakes get made. Either players saying they are ok when they are not. Or coaches wanting to get that winning start to the season. But they do take risks. Geelong took Ablett over to Perth despite having a hamstring injury in preseason, and that would have been a risk given his age. Hirdy flagged that on the podcast.
The thing with Joey is that it looked to the fans that he was not right and in fact the club knew that he was not right. They rolled the dice and took a chance it would come good. It don’t work out. And the consequences - we will have to wait and see.
Thing is we are too tall in the foward line anyway, if he is injured, get him out and bring in a small. with Tippa also injured I don’t know who that small is especally if you want to also drop a couple up the ground. What’s Long’s pressure like? Perhaps Long and Fanta if good to go? I would say Guelfi but he is needed up the ground, if not he could do a job for us.
From my perspective I can understand the need to play Joe rightly or wrongly.
As much as we all would like to think we are the finished article and should be competing for a top 4 place we are still very much a side in development. We have three new players that change our dynamic and also further changes/tweaks to our gameplan that were supposed to make us more defensive to compliment our attacking strength.
Now obviously that hasn’t played out but we still have to honour that route so that we can identify where the issues are so that we can resolve them. Part of that process is playing the key planks to the overall gameplan. one of which is obviously Joe.
If we for example rested him a few weeks ago and that happened to be for a month or two then we may need to play Hooker forward again or even bring Smack in. Either of those two changes would completely alter the way we go about things and then we have lost all the hard work we have put in to date.
It’s unfortunate that we are carrying injured players and I don’t like to see it either but we have also lost some crucial parts to our side already and the season is quickly descending into farce!
In my opinion if we are to salvage anything at all we need to maintain the route we are going find where the areas are that we are breaking down in and then fix it.
I bet the club punted on playing them while we were still a chance at playing finals & now that we are definitely out of the frame for finals the club fessed up about their problems and will rest them & blood the youngans
playing injured players can work. But it depends on what the injury is and whether the player can still perform with the injury.
Any type of muscle injury i reckon is almost impossible to play with. Bruised/cracked/broken fingers,ribs etc can at least be jabbed up so you don’t feel the pain
It’s a club mentality on Best 22, they treat it like the Australian Cricket team where once your anointed as a critical piece it’s impossible to be dropped…
I prefer clarksons approach, everybody is movable or droppable. You’re just a role to him and he doesn’t play injured players very often because injured players can’t play their role.
