Steve Bone

You look at injuries, again, not just at Pompey, but across all clubs at Premier League level and below, there's a lot of younger players getting injured now, which you wouldn't have expected previously, would you?

You'd have thought maybe the older age bracket, the 30 pluses, would have been the ones more likely to suffer from the greater intensity.

But I think it's all ages now.

There's plenty of 18, 19-year-olds, as we've seen, picking up these injuries as well.

And if it is down to the way football has changed, then football's going to have to maybe change again, isn't it?

You can't sustain over a long time this level of...

of injuries, you know, when clubs are having to pay players while they're injured, which obviously they are, and quite rightly they are, you know, how many of them, apart from the very rich ones, how many of those clubs can sustain that?

You know, having 25 players and eight of them at any one time are injured doesn't add up, does it?

So I can only think that that is the biggest factor, the way that football has changed.

Yeah, it'd be an interesting experiment, wouldn't it?

But which club would be brave enough to try it, knowing that all the other clubs were not trying it, and therefore there would be a few games where they could get out-pressed and out-sprinted?

It almost needs everyone to take the same approach, doesn't it?

For anyone to want to do it.

But I think, yeah, I think you would see a difference.

I think if training and matches could somehow be turned down a notch or two in terms of the intensity levels, I'm sure you would see fewer injuries.

You might...

You'd probably also, because football has evolved in that way, you'd probably also get a few fan bases saying, come on, you're not trying, you're not running.

Let's get stuck into them.

It would look like they weren't working as hard, which maybe they wouldn't be, but with good reason.

So it's a tricky one, isn't it?