Bombertalk

Interesting article re injuries to top 10 players & the number of games missed so far.

Makes our 8th position far more commendable given the players (eg Hille, Welsh, Spike etc.) who have been injured.

Again, Sydney are they lucky or what, bet that J McVeigh (hammy) gets up this week while our Monfries misses 2 weeks with a hammy.


INJURY LADDER
Games missed by injury in 2009 for clubs' top-10 players, based on last year's club best-and-fairest.

(AFL ladder position in brackets).

Essendon 36 (8th)

Melbourne 36 (16th)

Fremantle 31 (15th)

Richmond 28 (14th)

North Melb 21 (13th)

Collingwood 20 (4th)

Port Adelaide 20 (9th)

Hawthorn 16 (11th)

Carlton 15 (7th)

Geelong 15 (2nd)

W Bulldogs 13 (3rd)

St Kilda 12 (1st)

Brisbane Lions 10 (6th)

Adelaide 9 (5th)

West Coast 9 (12th)

Sydney 3 (10th)

Hopefully Hawthorn see that. All they have done this year is complain about injuries.

On further analysis its fair to say that with our games missed cut back by at least half to 18 we possibly could have won at least 2 more games ---norf & crows plus maybe get closer to the filth last friday, Hille could have been the difference.

Notice that the scum have only missed 15 games & still only equal with us.!! They are pathetic, relying on a few or Judd.

We are getting there & with a better run with injuries from now on & next year, we will be firmly entrenched in the uppper levels of the 8 !!!

Saw that and was going to post it myself.

We have done very well considering.

Also, maybe I should give Melbourne some credit - a shithouse club last year "on top" of the injury ladder this year can't be good.

Does anyone know if Melbourne are still paying the highest percentage of the salary cap like last year?

robrulz5 wrote:Hopefully Hawthorn see that. All they have done this year is complain about injuries.

Collingwoood too! They have been worse than the Hawks when it comes to crying about this!

Filthy wrote:

robrulz5 wrote:Does anyone know if Melbourne are still paying the highest percentage of the salary cap like last year?

With what?

All their members have sold their Rangies, skis, grange and holiday homes in "Portsay" and the turds are still broke.

Last year Melbourne had the highest player payments in the competiton over the whole playing list. I don't understand how a club in such financial difficulty and with such a young side can pay their players so much.

Hey all, couldn't help myself, and have plotted out those intriguing injury vs ladder stats - see below.



The graph shows a definite trend (blue dashed line) for a worsening ladder position as the injuries to the top ten team players increase (correlation coefficient = 0.5).

Teams above the dashed trend line are generally performing worse than expected from their injuries (all other things being assumed equal). Essendon is one of the notable outliers with the highest number of injuries, but a respectable ladder position of 8 (well done boys! =D> ).

Sydney is the opposite with a low injury count but relatively poor ladder position, which doesn't augur well for their team depth. West Coast and Hawthorn are also performing relatively poorly.

Regardless of Collingwood's whingeing, they only have a "middle of the road" level of injuries, and are actually performing quite well.

The Doggies, Geelong and St Kilda are obviously benefitting form their relatively low injury count.

Makes you wonder just how influential the footy gods and the medical/fitness team are ...

** this time with the graph I hope **

Hey all, couldn't help myself, and have plotted out those intriguing injury vs ladder stats - see below.



The graph shows a definite trend (blue dashed line) for a worsening ladder position as the injuries to the top ten team players increase (correlation coefficient = 0.5).

Teams above the dashed trend line are generally performing worse than expected from their injuries (all other things being assumed equal). Essendon is one of the notable outliers with the highest number of injuries, but a respectable ladder position of 8 (well done boys! =D> ).

Sydney is the opposite with a low injury count but relatively poor ladder position, which doesn't augur well for their team depth. West Coast and Hawthorn are also performing relatively poorly.

Regardless of Collingwood's whingeing, they only have a "middle of the road" level of injuries, and are actually performing quite well.

The Doggies, Geelong and St Kilda are obviously benefitting form their relatively low injury count.

Makes you wonder just how influential the footy gods and the medical/fitness team are ...

Fascinating. On this basis, we have performed exceptionally well and it really indicates the depth within the sqad that we can cover thos missing players and still perform creditably.

Awesome work juff! =D>

The teams overperforming, based on juff's findings, are St Kilda (6 spots ahead of where their injury rating places them), Geelong (5 1/2), Collingwood & Essendon (5 each). The Bulldogs come in next, 4 spots ahead of injury.

Interestingly, the teams underperforming have a solid trend of their own (while the others are all over the place). If a graph was plotted for just the bottom 8 sides, aside of Port, you could draw a straight line from Sydney (placed 10th with 3 injuries) to Melbourne (placed 16th with 36 injuries). With very little variation, nearly all the teams in the bottom 8 would fit on that straight line. Nearly every team is 3 spots behind their suggested ranking, according to injury, with the notable exceptions of Port (bang on their expected ladder placing), Sydney (5 places behind) and West Coast (6 places behind).

Nice work, juff.

But what's it all mean ?

I would like to take this one step further and do some analysis to try and find out of there are any common trends on those teams with a high rate of injuries and those with a low rate of injuries.

Would there be a trend

1. In player type of those injured
2. Practise ground/Playing ground
3. Game Style
4. Playing List age, Playing list weight or height and weight
5. Training/Warm down/up methods

if you could find some trends at the next level clubs would pay a lot of money for this information. I'm going to try and find this information.

Maybe it is very complex .. like once a few players get inured this puts more stress on the rest of the list and in turn causes more injuries .. or may if you get injuries to areas where a club has very little depth(an interesting measure in itself) this would precipiate more injuries...

Or maybe it's a simple thing like plain bad luck.

Yes, luck is such an important factor in this weird and wonderful game of ours. It's that extra bit of spice that makes the game so interesting - not just the injuries, but other things like the random bounce of that oval ball, haphazard decisions of umpires and the off-field social mishaps and motivations that variously happen to every club.

But injuries is definitely the biggest luck factor I think, and we sure have had a lot of bad luck in that area over the last five years. Injuries kill you in so many different ways:

• losing capable players for team selection
  losing players during a game so you have less rotations and flexibility in match-ups
  losing the stability of players regularly playing with each other in a settled team
  having underdone players on the field coming back from injury and trying to regain form

So I guess no surprise to see the trend in the graph, though didn't expect to see it so clearly, especially at only half way through the season. The trend should be even clearer with more data at the end of the season.

I'll bet you find that all grand finalists had a good run over the year with injuries. We sure did in 2000. I still remember thinking back then how good our new fitness coach, J Quinn, must be to keep our list so healthy - what irony!