Every player, club and county’s worst fears were confirmed for Dunshaughlin/Royal Gaels and Meath when news broke that Ruairi Kinsella’s knee injury sustained in training last weekend was indeed a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament.
The three words any sportsperson or fan dreads more than any other. So much so that it even has its own short code – ACL.
Now, my understanding of things is that the ligament is like an elastic band which allow the knee to bend and flex. And, again, only my understanding, the rupture of the ACL is, basically, when the elastic snaps. Which in itself can happen as easily as a tangle of legs or – as happened in Trevor Giles’ case, landing awkwardly after jumping for a ball.
Mind you, if you take those two examples off the menu, what is it that causes so many of the cursed impediments? Though it gives me no pleasure to say this, the only plausible explanation for the amount of these injuries there are now has to be something to do with the training teams are doing. What other common denominator is there between the amount of ACL injuries there are now.
That said, it’s hard to imagine that all the teams from whom there are players with the horror injury are doing absolutely identical training. So, if it’s not that there has to be has to be another link.
To that end, one factor which I admittedly didn’t even think of was the state of modern pitches. Think about it, when Colm O’Rourke and Pat Spillane were laid up with the vile thing, for one thing, it was almost always a career ender. And for another, when all pitches were clothed with ‘natural’ grown grass – as distinct from the artificial or hybrids of today – they could and would go soft and shi**y after a decent drop of rain. Whereas the modern incarnations are continuously in a tennis court state.
Now, if there was an accepted understanding that the firm state of pitches is playing a role in the propensity of the vile affliction to appear, what is the best way forward?
Granted, nobody would, presumably, want to go back to the days of the mucky, wet, sh1t pitches so, and I might be alone in this, surely it falls to sports science to come up with an antedote to the curse of the cruciate.
As in, and this could be entirely ridiculous on my behalf, you’d have thought with all the advances in sports science, a quicker and less arduous recovery route available to those unfortunate enough to be struck down by the damn thing.
Some day. We can but hope. Best wishes Ruairi for a speedy recovery
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