Cricket Australia’s current crop of fast bowlers are getting injured far too often. In most cases, they have no one to blame but their pre-match regimes.
Australian pace bowlers Peter Siddle, Pat Cummins, James Pattinson, Mitchell Johnson, Shane Watson, John Hastings, Doug Bollinger and Ryan Harris have all been injured over the summer or are currently injured.
Former Australian-Test bowler Geoff Thomson believes modern scientific theories are seeing more players injured then ever before.
There is a lot of talk that cricketers are simply playing more cricket than their bodies can handle. This is particularly relevant with the rise of Twenty20 cricket and IPL.
However modern cricket players are not playing enough physically demanding cricket to prepare their bodies for demanding competition.
As for the IPL, players have the choice of whether they want to play; if their workloads were too demanding surely they would take this time off.
Fast bowlers simply do not bowl enough during the week at training. More importantly, they are encouraged not to bowl at 100 percent intensity.
“What ever happened to the slogan ‘train the way you play’?”, Jeff Thomson asked News Limited’s Peter Badel and Robert Craddock.
“I remember at training we used to bowl until we dropped. Training was harder than games,” he added.
“We didn’t have people telling us at training we had done our 30 minutes, now take a break. We were physically conditioned for tough five-day games.”
Shane Watson is perfect evidence that fast bowlers are spending too much time in the gym.
He has been a notable gym goer and has arguable been sidelined due to injury more then any other current player. He is now instructed not to go to the gym and is banned from them.
Putting it simply, training more and doing less gym and advertising will prepare the body more physically and correctly for what they do in matches. Additionally players would improve skills.
A lot of injuries with fast bowlers are in their front foot. With the development of footwear that supports a fast bowlers foot, this just suggests that bowlers are not used to hitting the pitch with such a force.
This further highlights that, during training, bowlers are not replicating a game’s intensity. As such, their feet are not used to the workload of a match.
National players point out that they are playing more games of international cricket then ever before. What they do not counter for is that current national players do not play state cricket.
“People say they play more these days, but they forget that when we weren’t playing for Australia we played for our states,” Thompson said.
“On some days I would bowl as many overs playing club cricket as I did for my country!”
If Cricket Australia believes that players are playing too much, then why do they schedule so many games?
If it is that players are competing in too many games, why is it that the numerous amounts of sports-science representatives and physiotherapist the squad has are not preventing so many injuries from occurring?
Fast bowlers need to be bowling more overs and at a higher intensity at training, to prepare their bodies physically for the demands of competition.
They can find extra time for this by limiting how much time is spent in the gym and advertising products during the summer.
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