Roy Keane said something during the ITV coverage of yesterday’s match which made me think.
“We’ve almost been brainwashed in the last 10 years that Sam Allardyce is years ahead in terms of sports science, so why so many injuries?”
Why indeed? There have long been suspicious that the Chadwell heath pitches are the cause of some of our injuries. Big Sam raised that as a possibility the other day when he related a conversation with Alan Curbishley, who is convinced that is true. Allardyce dismissed it, but the very fact he raised it indicates he thinks there’s something in it. Either that, or our medical staff are not up to scratch, or it’s just a run of bad luck that all clubs get at some stage.
It’s no secret that the Chadwell Heath facilities are not exactly state of the art and I wonder whatever happened to the plans to sell the site and build a new training centre elsewhere. Perhaps those plans should be revived fairly quickly. If we’re going to attract high quality players we need to have the best facilities to get the best out of them. I have no idea how much it would cost to build a new training centre with quality pitches, but surely it has to be seen as a good investment.
Sam Allardyce has got a reputation for relying heavily on sports science and statistics. Surely he has go an answer as to why our players get injured so much – what were the stats at Bolton, Newcastle and Blackburn?