DOES LATEST CELTIC INJURY DRAMA POINT TO WIDER PROBLEM?
- BY LIAM CARRIGAN
- 58 minutes ago
- 3 min read
Celtic’s loss to Midtjylland last night was disappointing, but, if we’re being honest, not exactly unexpected.
Sometimes this kind of footballing reality check is exactly what a club needs, to keep players grounded after the “new manager bounce” begins to fade.
In all honesty, with all the recent uncertainty surrounding Celtic, with several unresolved issues between the board and the fans, and still no clear idea who the new manager is going to be, European football is, perhaps quite far down the list of priorities for many fans at the moment.
That being said, watching Celtic lose is never palatable, and we definitely didn’t play to our best last night.
I’m more worried about the injury to our latest emerging star, Callum Osmand.
It points, perhaps to bigger Celtic injury problem, and one that needs solved, quickly.
Are Celtic Injury Problems Down to Training Methods?
Now, the reality is that any player can be injured at any time during a professional football match. This is still a contact sport, and a sport that requires tremendous physical endurance. It also puts great strain on several of the human body’s key muscle groups.
There seems to be an alarming number of hamstring injuries at Celtic this season.
Now, the two most common causes of hamstring injuries in footballers are “Explosive movement” and “rapid directional change”.
Explosive movement is what we more commonly refer to as a “burst of pace”. Going from a walking or standing start to a full speed sprint in a matter of seconds, to try and get in ahead of an opposing player.
The other common cause “rapid directional change” is perhaps why wingers are specifically vulnerable to this type of injury. Sudden twisting and turning, in an attempt to confuse and get past an opposing defender is integral to wing play, as indeed is the aforementioned “explosive movement”.
Callum Osmand joins Kelechi Iheanacho, Alistair Johnston and Daizen Maeda on the list of Celtic players to have recently missed first team game time due to hamstring injuries.
Reo Hatate also suffered a hamstring injury earlier in the season, though thankfully his was just a minor strain.
Towards the end of last season Cameron Carter-Vickers also missed a number of games due to a hamstring issue.
Now as I said, these are common injuries in footballers, specifically footballers for whom pace is a big part of their game.
However, it is unusual to see so many players in the same team pick up the same kind of injury within such a small period of time.
There are other common causes of these hamstring injuries in footballers.
They stem not from the nature of the sport, but from poor preparation and bad training habits.
A lack of adequate warm-up or proper rest between matches or highly intensive training sessions can increase the risk of this injury (We directly saw this with Alistair Johnston a couple of weeks ago, when he aggravated his previous injury by being brought back too soon).
Muscular distribution is another training issue that Celtic’s staff need to consider. If you overtrain your front thigh muscles (known as the quadriceps) then they can actually pull on your hamstrings during activity, causing injury and aggravating previous minor injuries into major ones.
I don’t know if this is the case at Celtic. To paraphrase Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy from Star Trek: “I’m a writer, not a doctor!”
However, these recurring injuries are now at the point where they are becoming a concern. I hope Celtic’s sports science team are on top of this. The last thing we need right now is any more injuries, with a tough end of year run of games coming up very soon.