Ben Venn's Injury Table

It will be a massive loss if he is out.

Wonder how the TAB have shifted the odds...

This morning the Jets were $2.30 and we were $2.80, but that was before the news about Riera.

Cunningham has a suspected broken foot

Italiano playing at dm. Gould on the bench. We've got no worries at all.

cunningham walked out after game 

Caira gone for 6 weeks. Manny has a ban.

Our backline is beginning to look a little ginger...

I guess ASB premiership teams would be pretty angry if we took their best players at this stage of their season well other than a certain Canterbury United

21 matches missed in first 17 rounds due to injury. 41 matches in 8 rounds since then.

Number of players unavailable by round.....

• Phoenix have had 9 games where five or more players have been unavailable. From those games they have collected just 5 points.
  
• When the Phoenix have won, they have averaged 2.7 players unavailable. 3.6 for draws, and 4.0 for losses.

Perchance are you an analyst at all?

Maybe.....

But hey sometimes it is better to have mindless angsting.

I agree. I have stayed out a bit the last two weeks because of it.

I still think people have lost sight of the fact that when healthy, we have a good football team.

Phoenix subs for their R2 game: Boxall, Riera, Hicks, Ifill.
Phoenix subs for their R26 game: Adams, Hicks, Boyd, Watson.

Does the number and frequency of injuries not lead to further questions needing to be asked about the conditioning of the players etc from a training point of view? 

They're mostly pretty freak accidents aren't they? The A league is only 27 games long and basically never more than 1 game a week, so I do doubt it on that basis also. 

And Riera was a late signing so you can't really blame the club's preseason conditioning in that case. Also if Siggy tore his muscle in the last game I'd say the pitch would be more to blame if anything. If the pitch is ultra boggy injuries are more likely.

Oops double post

 

 

Just looked back out our starting line ups this season

• We've had 9 different players in the back four. Playing in 11 different combinations. Which is extraordinary given Dura and Siggy played together 24 times this season.

• Our most common combination was Dura/Siggy/Muscat/Fenton which occurred 6 times. Conceding just 4 goals.

• In the last 10 games we had 8 different combinations. No wonder we leaked 30 of our 51 goals during that time.

Crazy to think that Fenton was part of the most common back four combination given how early he got injured.

 

Once Riera got up to fitness, and Fenton was back from injury, our top back four was Dura/Siggy/Muscat/Fenton

Bit like Roux I think. But Ernie did play a lopsided squad to counter that. Manny held back to create a back three with Riera in front, while Fenton bombed down the right side. I think we lost a bit of that go forward when Boxall took over.

The PFA has released its Injury Report. Nix ranked 8th, with only the Glory and Sydney having more injuries.

http://www.pfa.net.au/fileadmin/user_upload/_temp_...

Page 9 has the list of unavailable because of injury per round, rather depressing end to the season for us.

not sure it's a problem to not know the answer to that question, more a sign of good squad depth

in my probable order of preference, albeit haven;t seen a lot of Roly yet

CBs Dura, Sig, Rolly, Boxall

LBs Rolly, Manny 

RBs Fenton, Manny

(+Caira, BS and Boxall as FB options)

I'm feeling good about these options 

I am also thinking the back up options are pretty close and certainly the best we could have put out in the prev season

so the competitiveness and ability to rest a player and cover for injuries looks somewhere between fantstic and fine to me, especially for a team that has no marquees

+ I'm keen to see Fenton back offering us that lopsided attacking threat from FB, though Roly may offer us something equally good on the other side as well?

Doyle?

yeh, good point, my bad

embarrassment of riches really

so just stick him in there at LB at whatever place in the pecking order your personal view puts him 

We were doing ok

Going to be interesting to see how the Victory's season goes injury wise. They have signed the former Sydney fitness coach, Crea. The Sydney fans put a lot of the blame for their injury woes on him last season. They could go from best to worst possibly if his track record stays the same.

This actually makes me happy.

I got to the end of last season and I was feeling REALLY down about how we had gone. For the first time ever I asked myself whether I was going to renew my season ticket. I had a LOT of other bad things going on in my life, so perhaps that affected how I was seeing things.

Seeing how badly we were affected by injury makes me feel less aggreived about the way we finished last year.

Additionally the squad now is really exciting.

I can't wait to sing "It's good to be back..."

I have to ask if people are really surprised by this. I thought it was screamingly obvious our season was trashed through injury and having to cobble together a playing 11 in end

People have short memories JV

I get that but it was a lot of doom and gloom about how shit we were when the reality was that we were just wounded.

We have a far better team than last year and I think Ernies recruitment (sans a STRIKER) has been very good. I expect good things this year from a team that I expect should be able to make the playoff and I would expect top 4 based on what I have seen thus far with the Carlsberg FU tour.