A guest post by @KatLPugh
“Players are not machines” https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54307869
I was lying in bed this morning celebrating Manchester United’s bizarre manner of victory yesterday and struck by reading an article on the BBC where Guardiola was lamenting on the mounting injuries in the Manchester City team.
It’s no secret that footballers will often be encouraged to play through pain and will play injured. Last season Marcus Rashford continued to play (wrongly in many people’s opinion) with a back injury. Sometimes the passion for the game will mean that the footballers themselves are the ones making the decision to continue playing, and recently we have seen the introduction of regulations regarding concussion injuries where the decision has to be made by the team doctor.
The same cannot be said for gymnastics. At this year’s Chinese National Championships Guan Chenchen fell awkwardly from bars but carried straight back on, and in the Rio 2016 Olympics Ellie Downie under-rotated on floor and landed on her neck, but still continued with her routine. She also cited signs of concussion at the time.
Whilst this isn’t a true story there may well be cases of this, it is mentioned in the ABC Family series Make it or Break it, where Sasha Belov (Neil Jackson) highlights that when he was coaching back in Romania a young gymnast suffered concussion. Afterwards she seemed fine, so he highlights that he gave the family the choice of whether to take her home or take her to the hospital and they decided to take her home. Within an hour she had died. How many chances do we need to take before this happens? Concussion is serious.
I have yet to hear of any footballers playing on a broken leg. I’m sure someone will correct me if this is the case. Dominique Moceanu was left frightened to speak out about the unbearable pain she was in and to train on a broken leg just weeks before the Olympic games.
We do perhaps joke about how footballers are wrapped in cotton wool, especially when they roll around in agony allegedly feigning injury from an invisible foul, but at least when they are injured they are taken seriously. We don’t see Jose Mourinho telling his own players to stop pretending to be injured – maybe the opposition – although even with serious injuries all players and managers will show concern.
It comes down to this. A team loses a player who is a top penalty taker in the final minute of extra time due to a broken leg and the match goes to penalties as a result. Does the manager insist the player remains on the field to take a spot kick with their other uninjured leg and do this with one leg or do they rely on someone else? I appreciate the comparison to Kerri Strug was that they didn’t have a back-up person to come on and vault, but the bottom line is keeping the injured player on would never happen. So why is it okay elsewhere?
I go back to Pep’s quote about players not being machines. Machines are getting more and more capable of being human, but it’s not the other way round. I think we are in danger of forgetting that. We have to understand that every human is an incredibly complex array of genes. No one person is the same. They will think and feel and respond to pressure in a different way. One remark might affect one person in a completely different way to the next. And a coach has to work out how to get the best out of each of those gymnasts, not assume that they will be the same.
I was heartened to hear that FIG are going to be running an e-conference on this at the end of October, but I’ve yet to see details on how to join this. If they are truly to act to make positive change happen, then this will only be the start.