The price of a slow start to the season

[ROK Lobster]

Is LRT this season (and possibly Crouch last season) the price the club has paid for slow starts to the season the year before? Not that it is a big issue, but I wonder if LRT played last year when injured - and consequently did more damage - because to make the top 4 Sydney had to win so many of their games late last season. This year, things seem more like a better, or at least more balanced, start to the season is planned (or certainly more seriously sought), and also that injuries are being more cautiously managed. Of course it is all speculation but I cannot really beleive no players suffered injuries at all the last couple of years of the sort we have seen the last couple of weeks. If we were 1 and 4 coming into this week, playing against a side that we should beat but easilly lose to if we were off the mark, I think that it would be much more likely that Ablett and Buchy would be lining up. As I said, pure speculation, but I think that a faster start provides the opportunity to allow bodies that could be dragged through if really required to mend a little more which may have repurcusions not only at the end of this season, but at the start of the next one. It also allows a trickle of young blokes into senior footy which, after two years without a lot of churn, is required - but that's another thread.

[Tuco]

I think you could argue that the lack of churn on our seniors list has led to possibly too much being on too few shoulders for a couple of years. When you consider the injuries we caried into the 2005 and 2006 Grand Finals, it's amazing how well we performed. But isn't that just the tradeoff of having a senior group of players that are performing so well together?

[NMWBloods]

Arguably it's a case of borrowing from the future to pay for the present.

[Pommie Swannie]

Arguably it's a case of borrowing from the future to pay for the present.

Agreed. However, I'm pretty sure that if you asked the players who carried injuries into finals and the two GF's, none of them would have done anything different.

I would imagine the prospect of winning a flag would push you to play on where under other circumstances you would succumb to the injury - it happens in all sports.

[liz]

Not sure about your LRT assertion. If you take what Roos says at face value (and I don't see why you wouldn't) LRT told them his foot was fine at the end of last season and he started pre-season training normally. Had he been aware a bit quicker that it wasn't fine, they could have treated it properly before Christmas and he might be playing now.

I do find it a little surprising that the medical staff didn't check up on his foot more proactively given they seem to do so much other stuff so well and it was clearly troubling him for the last month of the season.

[satchmopugdog]

Yes...we know he takes his time with decision making but that is ridiculous.