Lee Radford reveals why he thinks there are so many injuries in Super League

The opening month of the Betfred Super League season has seen a huge amount of injuries suffered by pretty much every club, several clubs have mounting injury problems.

Speaking to Hull FC coach Lee Radford,before he takes his team to Wakefield tonight to play Chris Chester’s injury ravaged team.

He offered his own thoughts on why he believes clubs are having the injury problems they are, this early in the season.

The Airlie Birds boss said: “I think it’s a cluster of reasons, I don’t know whether you watch that Super League show on a Wednesday.

“They do a piece every week, with a team training and, every team I’ve seen train have been on a 3G, and they’ve probably been on a 3G now for four or five months.

“When you jump from a 3G onto that out there this week, it’s different footing. Manu Ma’u got a twinge in his knee last week, because the ground didn’t give way when he put his foot down to step.

“When he does it out there today it does, so to bounce, science tells you, when you bounce from one hard ground, to a soft ground, to a hard ground, your body struggles to adapt to that.

“Possibly that is one reason, another is because we play far too many games, simply put.”

“The 3G is not good on your joints. Grass is better on your joints than concrete is, so when you flip between the two, it is what it is.

“But like I say, it’s the same for every team, but you’re right a lot of teams are carrying a lot of lower limb injuries at this moment in time.

But does that simply bring a challenge to the players, to be able to adapt? “If you can adapt. But like I say, we’ve jumped on the field this week, because we’ve had a week of decent weather.

“But there’s no way we could’ve got on the field last week, so we had a week on the 3G, the week before was the same.
“What surface you train on is unfortunately not up to us, it’s the big fella upstairs who’s deciding that for us.

“That’s hard to adapt to, when you have one day on soft turf, and one day on hard turf, so maybe we’ll invent something in the middle, like a 3G that gives, I would train on it.”