With only one injury Penrith is way on top

[Danny]

It's very interesting looking at the injury states of some clubs in the NRL at the moment. Leading the way is Newcastle with 14 players injured at the moment including star player Andrew Johns. At the other end of the spectrum is Penrith with one! The advantages of playing with an injury free squad is evident by the way Penrith are playing at the moment. Being able to train as a squad and maintain their winning combinations is invaluable. It would be very interesting to see the different injury management and prevention strategies adopted by different clubs. Do clubs work together to lower the overall injury toll or is it an individual process where clubs try to keep secret their treatment and prevention strategies to gain an advantage?

[injuryupdate]

The doctors and physios at different NRL clubs tend to work together a fair bit, but the fitness advisors and coaches probably keep things a bit more secretive. The Penrith situation at the moment is very interesting. Penrith used to have one of the worst injury rates in the competition (prior to John Lang coming across) and Cronulla (when Lang was there) generally did well with injuries. Lang brought a lot of his support staff (trainers) over to Penrith with him, so obviously between them they do a very good job at keeping injury rates down.

At Penrith, they probably stick to training the players in a fashion that they would have used over many years, and they are probably on to something, but in all honesty they may not even know what they are doing differently to other teams (if anything) that is causing lower injury rates.

I did hear, off the record, that from sources within the Kangaroo Tour last year that apparently the Penrith players were LESS aerobically fit than the other players on tour and struggled at times to keep up. There may be something in this, in that it suggests that perhaps Penrith don't aerobically train as hard as other teams. This may lead to lower fitness and injury rates. The lower fitness sounds bad, but if you have your best team on the park most weeks, and they don't drop the ball, they probably spend less time in defence than the opposition so don't need to be as fit.

The Roosters, by contrast, aim to be aerobically the fittest team in the competition, but it may mean they are more prone to injuries than Penrith.

Obviously there is a lot of theory in all of these suggestions, and unfortunately it is unlikely that clubs will ever combine to compare their fitness regimes and their consequent results on performance and injury rates.

[injuryupdate]

An article in last week's Big League detailed Penrith's charmed run with injuries that has finally come to an end. They listed the availability of each team's top players in 2003, with the following 'ladder':

Penrith (89.1%), Canberra (85.3%), Brisbane (84.7%), Bulldogs (84.3%), Roosters (80.6%), Manly (80.6%), Nth Qld (80.4%), Melbourne (80.3%), Warriors (78.9%), Cronulla (75.2%), Wests (72.5%), Dragons (71.1%), Newcastle (70.6%), Souths (67.6%), Parramatta (63.5%).

I imagine these figures take into account losses through rep selection and loss of form. Although Parramatta had a bad run with injuries last year, they wouldn't have had an injury rate of 36.5% in their top 17, so some of this figure must have been players who were dropped due to loss of form.