New Zealand Cricket’s sports science medical co-ordinator Warren Frost is hopeful an injury surveillance programme can be in place at first-class and international level this summer

Lynn McConnell31-Jul-2002New Zealand Cricket’s sports science medical co-ordinator Warren Frost is hopeful an injury surveillance programme can be in place at first-class and international level this summer.The move was necessary because medical staff were finding a steady stream of players stepping up to international play with injury concerns.”We only know what happens at TelstraClear Black Cap level at the moment and we need to know information from the level below.”Because there is no information available we tend to end up chasing our tails when players are selected and we can’t address the injury problems in a competitive environment,” Frost said.He made the announcement when asked to comment on research out of Australia dealing with fast bowling injuries.The report done in Australia was by Dr John Orchard of the South Sydney Sports Medicine Centre, and the report has been published recently in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.The study was done of elite level Australian cricket between the seasons of 1995/96-2000/01 in order to present a profile of injuries and a preliminary analysis of the risk factors for injury.Orchard’s study produced results even before it was completed. During the course of analysis it was revealed that seven injuries occurred in Australia in the first five years of the study from players colliding with boundary fences when sliding to field the ball.On seeing this, the Australian Cricket Board instituted a policy of using a boundary rope. As a result no similar injuries were recorded in the last season of the study.Frost, who heard about the study when with the New Zealand team in Australia last summer, disagreed with some of the findings but said the numbers backed up what had been occurring in New Zealand.”The numbers are comparable. The report quantifies the situation and has given us impetus in establishing the numbers in New Zealand, especially below international level.”The Australian report also made injury comparisons with other sports, including rugby, and Orchard found that overall injuries in cricket were eight percent, compared to Australian Rules football at 15%, first grade rugby league 16% and 13% in state rugby union.But fast bowlers were right up there among the other sports at 14%.Orchard found spin bowlers and batsmen had only a four percent injury percentage and wicket-keepers were down at two percent.Orchard claimed that bowlers were more likely to be injured when their team was bowling second because teams warmed up before the start of play on the first day of games, and there wasn’t enough time between innings for bowlers to prepare.Frost said he didn’t agree with that contention. Orchard also claimed there needed to be more monitoring of the bowler’s workload, as in the way baseball pitchers are monitored.But Frost, who recently returned from a trip to the United States where he studied the baseball treatment of pitchers, found the monitoring was more due to historical precedent than medical fact.”I spoke with the San Francisco Giants and San Diego Padres about their handling of pitchers. Their best pitchers would start on the first day and throw 100-120 pitches before they were taken off and replaced by their finish-off pitchers.”But when I asked their coaches why they did that, they shrugged their shoulders and said they didn’t know.”Those pitchers would then throw and catch over the next four or five days before they pitched again, but nobody could say why it worked that way,” he said.Frost was loath to make comparisons across different sports, for example rugby was played over 80 minutes and cricket six hours. There was an endurance component to cricket that was required in rugby and there was repetitive action for bowlers which meant it wasn’t surprising they suffered injury.Because of this it was an overuse problem for cricketers, especially with their tendons while rugby players tended to suffer muscle strains or haematomas which could be gone a week later. And rugby injury numbers didn’t seem to be quite as obvious as in cricket such as when a Chris Cairns got injured in the first innings of a match and wasn’t able to play in the rest of it.Frost returned from the United States with the distinct impression that New Zealand was ahead of the US in what it was doing in the sports medicine area.There was much more sharing of information between the disciplines of medicine here.”The value of our medical panel at New Zealand Cricket is that anyone is free to question anyone else. There is no hierarchy.”But in the US they tend to stick to their own areas, and they tend to use machines to look at problems rather than thinking about what might be causing them.”A classic example of difference was at one of the baseball clubs he visited a coach opened a drawer and said the things he was showing Frost were the greatest things going.Frost told him, “They are made in the city I come from.” They were formthotics which are made in Christchurch.Meanwhile, New Zealand Cricket’s medical advisors are busy doing their winter screening of 32 players in matters of medical, mechanical, skeletal, dietary and podiatry aspects of their fitness, something that has been done over all recent winters.