Steve Bone

He says we are, as you'd expect, we're doing everything we can behind the scenes to prevent the injuries and then to look at as to why they're happening.

And he quite rightly makes the point that there's a lot of different types of injury.

You know, there's a few muscle injuries, but there's a few impact injuries as well.

He's quite insistent that there's nothing wrong with the training pitches.

He says they were relayed, I think, last year.

There's no worries over the general quality of the surface that they're training on.

And he does say it's not the case that all the injuries have been picked up there.

Some of them have, some of them haven't.

And he said we're constantly looking at it all, as you would hope.

And they don't seem to have got to the bottom of it yet, if there is anything to get to the bottom of.

I don't have any magic answers to it, but I think the biggest factor is the way the intensity of football has changed over the past few years.

And I'm talking about probably in the past...

five years even you know since you go back to it's a useful sort of time to go back to and judge things by you go back to covid and the lockdowns and the period where we had no football and then we had behind closed doors football and then it came back um it seems it to me that since then a lot of clubs pumping among the worst sufferers but not the only sufferers a lot of clubs have had a lot more injuries than they had before that

I think football has evolved quite quickly into being a faster game, a more pressing game.

So over the 90 minutes, players are expected to be...

sprinting more, generally, over short bursts to press and to move quickly in possession as well.

When you're playing the number of games they are, when you're playing two games a week, which they often are,

to have that sort of intensity, although you hear people say they only have to work for 90 minutes a week or 180 minutes a week, that's not much, but actually with the intensity that's expected in that short period of time, it's a lot to ask of the muscles in players' bodies, isn't it?

Some will cope with it without any problem at all, others will struggle at times, others will struggle all the time, and that's where you're seeing

I think so many injuries.