BLESSURES

Every day I receive emails and notes about the injuries at AJAX. There are (too) many injured players. They are injured (far too) long.

What that was like in my time?

Of course, I don't know exactly what injuries there are. I also read it in the press.

What is indeed striking is the number of injuries and that there are so many muscle injuries.

I get the impression that today's players have much less resilience than in my time. The players in those days were tougher and more motivated, it seems.

With a real muscle injury, it is obvious. Straight off the pitch and an ice pack on the affected area. Never try to continue playing with, say, a whiplash (hamstring injury, calf). But with other injuries, it is often quite possible. If you watch English football on Saturday afternoon on TV, you see terrible collisions, a knee in someone's thigh, a kick to the knee, etc. The players are taken care of for a while and then move on quietly. In Canada, I learned that you can 'walk out' of many injuries. Don't walk off the field immediately at the slightest pain.

If a (sports) injury has been properly examined and nothing is broken or torn, then intensive treatment should be started. Preferably twice a day. In my time (and I still use it), I had ultra-sound and other applications. Anything 'old ' is not bad! On the contrary.

A 'normal' injury should heal within two weeks, or sooner.

What I see now that players are out of the running for weeks, I find strange, to put it mildly.

In my time, the motto was "Salo how you do it doesn't matter, as long as I can play on Sunday". And usually that worked out. Now I miss that .

But I can (unfortunately) say nothing about the treatments at AJAX. But that the healing process takes a long time is clear.