Hamstring injuries remain the biggest pain in Australian football

AFL injury lists are loaded with hamstring injuries - and seemingly more than usual this season

STRUNG OUT: Port Adelaide defender Jasper Pittard joined the growing hamstring injury list in AFL football in the Power’s finale to the pre-season. Picture: Sarah Reed

IS the AFL footballers’ curse – hamstring injuries – striking back this season?

After a decade of progress with fitness staff minimising the time lost with hamstring tightness, strains and tears, the most common injury in Australian football appears too common again.

At the weekend, Adelaide lost its club champion and All-Australian midfielder Matt Crouch with a left-hamstring injury before half-time of the grand final rematch against Richmond at Adelaide Oval.

He joins North Melbourne recruit Sam Gibson and versatile defender Kyle Cheney on the Crows’ injury list with hamstring pain.

Port Adelaide declared its playmaker Chad Wingard was troubled with hamstring soreness late in the remarkable comeback win against Sydney at the SCG on Easter Sunday. This follows Wingard having an interrupted pre-season with hamstring issues – as did Jared Polec, captain Travis Boak and defender Jasper Pittard.

The AFL premiership season started with 15 players on the 18 clubs’ injury lists with hamstring injuries. There were another four at the weekend, including Collingwood’s Darcy Moore and Hawthorn veteran Shaun Burgoyne.

Magpies football boss Geoff Walsh notes players who have a limited pre-season, such as Moore and Wingard, “are always a bit more susceptible” to soft-tissue injuries and repetitive setbacks. It’s a vicious cycle,” Walsh notes. “You have to get him up going and he came back quickly ...”

Moore now faces another 21-28 days on the sidelines - and a test of the Collingwood fitness team to know when the young forward is at minimal risk of a repeat strain.

The AFL medical unit is still working through the injury reports from 2017 to determine how costly hamstring injuries are to the game.

However, a review of the injury lists in the 10 seasons from 2007-2016 highlight a victory in preparing and managing players. Clubs lost an average of 24.3 games to hamstring strains in 2007. This fell to 19.7 in 2016.

These figures are significantly higher than knee injuries, a trauma reduced by the rule changes that stopped ruckmen crashing into each other to dangerously knock their knees; and ankle sprains.

But the question of why hamstring injuries remain such a curse to AFL players is still testing the experts, such as academic Josh Ruddy at the Australian Catholic University. He has been gathering data - involving as many as 200 players from five AFL clubs - to look at the lessons from hamstring injuries since 2013.

Critically, Ruddy’s study team is wanting to help AFL club medical teams be smarter in seeing the alarm bells on hamstring injuries - a concept that would have helped Moore (and others) on his return to the field.

Ruddy notes from the large volume of data on hamstring strains, the fitness gurus have cracked a very small part of the code on the injury.

“There are a lot of questions and factors in why the injury is occurring,” Ruddy said in an AFL report in the summer.

“We’ll never be able to predict injury with 100 per cent accuracy and prevent all injuries occurring, but the more injury data we can get, perhaps, we can build on this.

“Ultimately, if we can predict injury with any sort of accuracy, we will go a long way to preventing it.”