The real reason why Newcastle United had far more lost days to injury last season | OneFootball

The final whistle goes on the England v Denmark game and Kieran Trippier is picked up on camera lying supine, exhausted and breathing out his backside.

Meanwhile, somewhere far away, Eddie Howe is shouting out loud at the TV in frustration.

While my FA level 1 badge pretty much puts me up there with Eddie Howe and his team in terms of coaching elite modern athletes, it’s other areas admittedly, where my real expertise lies in.

So seeing and reading some of the utter cobblers talked about our injury crisis last season, I thought I might try and help clarify how elite athletes, modern sports science and injuries all come together.

Last season, will be generally known in the future as ‘that season when everyone at Newcastle United got injured!’ More days lost through injury than any other team in the league by a good margin.

Coupled with the ‘Whole Tonali Thing’, the situation was perfectly encapsulated by Anthony Gordon’s “availability is the best ability“ meme.

Of course, other teams had injury problems, albeit not to the same extent. With this in mind, I thought it might help to understand why we were so badly affected by the depletions suffered to our squad during the injury crisis.

The obvious factor is the whole “intensity is our identity’ thing.

Newcastle United under Eddie Howe play a Gegenpress and play it with a kind of corybantic freneticism that has left opponents looking back at us with thousand yard stares. The demands of this type of game plan, however, are obvious – players frequently stating that they needed being in bed by nine thirty every night after Eddie took over, as they were too cream crackered to stay up longer.

This approach requires a whole new level of fitness and it never fails to make me angry when I think of the utter charlatanory of Steve Bruce in claiming to be a football coach, when you hear how unfit and un-coached our players were under his watch.

Eddie Howe elevated them to where they were required to be – as a bare minimum I might add – as professional footballers, before taking them into the realms of elite athletics.

However, what are we actually talking about here? Elite athletes etc?

So, as we all know, the only purpose of the England football team is to show the rest of the country what it is like to support Newcastle United. Won nowt since the late sixties, massive expectations, fanatical support and a string of managers when the real issues were systemic.

While the rest of the world was embracing sports science and athleticism, England’s footballers were doing dentist chair drinking games in the middle of tournaments.

And the outcomes were consequently predictable.

Love or Hate him – One thing Gareth Southgate has presided over was a move away from the outdated cronyism that dominated the English FA and seen it dragged into the modern age.

This move into making our footballers elite athletes has seen them go from nightclub dwelling playboys to utterly focused and committed sportsmen, whose entire life is controlled by their professional commitments.

No Days Off.

Every meal, every drink, every night’s sleep, in fact every aspect of the modern professional footballers’ lives are honed to make their performance optimal. Samples of blood are taken as they train to scan for injury markers. GPS trackers show how far and how fast they’ve moved in training. This is the kind of thing I saw in Olympians as a younger man and now it’s expected of our footballers too.

Now, this approach is typical to all modern pro teams, especially in the top tiers. With Newcastle United though, it’s just that extra bit intense, because that’s how our coach needs it. If you’re going to be better than your opponents then you start by training better than your opponents.

This is how Eddie Howe thinks. You can watch his various interviews on podcasts etc about his approach and it’s there for all to see. Also, he needs this intensity in the press he employs tactically and that requires optimal fitness.

So, here we get into the nitty gritty of sports science or, more accurately, the Holy Grail of sports science and Sports medicine.

The Holy Grail of all modern sports science is for the athletes to be able to access that ten percent of energy that your body keeps back in reserve. That last bit of juice your body doesn’t trust you with as it’s all that’s left.

It’s been well known anecdotally that this is how your body manages its stamina. Countless accounts of people being on their chin straps but somehow finding some last, hidden strength from somewhere to survive.

And, if you can get your athlete to access this last emergency fuel tank then you have them able to apply all of their available energy to the task of completing.

While it’s understandable that those involved would want this outcome, it does come with inherent risks. And this is where fatigue comes in.

It has been discovered that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) is what happens when the body has assessed itself as being under such significant or sustained threat that it releases the emergency energy. The problem here, however, is that we modern humans unfortunately respond to our modern problems with archaic physical reactions. The stress might be your work or your bank account but no amount of adrenaline and fight or flight is going to help that issue.

What happens subsequently is that once our system allows the emergency energy to be expended (or simply believes it’s gone) it orders you to rest and recuperate, which is why CFS sufferers just want to lie down the whole time and feel like they have zero energy. Their body is in recovery mode. We call this fatigue. Chronic fatigue.

So, you can see how this wound be a major problem with a professional sports person.

And what happened at Newcastle United was that our injuries became a compound problem. Each new player taken from the squad meant an increase in the demands placed on those left fit. This increase in demand caused the risk of injury to rise due to increased demand and so we get new injuries and the problem is compounded.

For those left, their increasingly demanded upon bodies begin to think they must be constantly fighting a pack of sabre tooth tigers or similar. So, as they go into the realm of their last ten percent, their emergency reserve, their bodies then demand that they rest! The more they eat into the reserves, the more fatigue they experience.

We’ve seen plenty of this in the last ten months at Newcastle. None more so than Kieran Trippier and Sean Longstaff, with an honourable mention to Bruno G. How badly they needed a really meaningful recovery period. Proper rest. Not a day or two of light training, but a well planned and monitored rehabilitation from fatigue.

Eddie Howe will know all this. It’s one reason why his exasperation at the post-season tour was so obvious and easy to spot just under the surface of his ‘always immaculate’ press meetings. He wanted his men to rest. He knew they needed a significant period of down time to mend.

Hopefully, he’s been able to incorporate it into their holidays. As always, those involved in international duty will be later starting pre-season than the rest.

Our summer recruitment will no doubt reflect this spectre of fatigue. Not in numbers but in who gets brought in. They will have the ability to perform at the highest level and in a robust ‘availability is the best ability’ style.

That said, of course, our one recruit so far has a question mark over his fitness over a season, but I notice that a lot of the work done with Sandro Tonali over his ‘lost season’, has been on his physical robustness.

I hope we have a much better season than last with injuries. Talk of the ground being too hard at the training ground persists, but at least the club is run by grown ups now and the injury crisis will have been analysed, steps taken to mitigate it happening again.

Of course, there will be injuries over the season. However, hopefully scenes of our players underperforming, clearly fatigued and in desperate need of meaningful rest, won’t be a feature of our season. Hopefully.

(As a bit of background, I (Geordiedog) am an NHS nurse of over thirty years and a qualified CBT specialist in PTSD. I also coached football at Hanwell Town ‘the Geordies’ Youth FC)