Town boss Kieran McKenna says the intensity of the day-to-day work at Playford Road hasn’t been to blame for the number of muscle injuries which have affected the squad this season, with managing their training load having been looked at since planning for the campaign.

The Blues have taken pride in reducing the number of muscle injuries at the club over the last few seasons but this year more players have missed games with problems of that type, most notably hamstring issues, from Nathan Broadhead in the first week of pre-season to Axel Tuanzebe against Nottingham Forest last week with the defender now facing a long spell on the sidelines.

McKenna was asked whether training might have contributed to the number of muscle injuries with fewer midweek fixtures in the Premier League having meant more harder sessions.
 
“Of course, it's something that we've looked at in planning for the season and in the season to manage our training load in an appropriate way,” he said.

“I think we're doing a good job of that, to be honest. I understand the question. I think our injuries, the longer-term ones, Axel cutting his thumb and then getting a hamstring injury sprinting up and down the line against [Callum] Hudson-Odoi at a level that he hasn't played at for quite a few years.  
 
“George Hirst, battling coming on against Tottenham. [Chiedozie] Ogbene snaps an Achilles against Brentford. I think most of our big injuries have been that. The physical jump in the league is really, really big in the matches. 
 
“From a physical point of view, the players are giving so much in the games for a newly promoted team.

“We're in the top third of Premier League teams for almost every metric, which is a big effort, to make that jump and compete. That's very rare for a newly promoted team. So I know how much the players are given in matches. 
 
“And, of course, that's going to have a strain. So we're modifying training a lot more than we would have done in the Championship or League One, trying to adapt for that.  
 
“We knew it was a season, going into the season, where we probably would have more injuries. We've had a really good injury record in general over the last few years.  
 
“So we've modified as much as we can, but there's also a risk of not training intensely and going into the most intense league in the world in a position where we know we're going to have to run and fight so, so hard in every game.

“To not prepare for that by never training hard, but also by science and by common knowledge understand that that will probably lead to more injuries. 
 
“So, I think it's a mixture of all things, but we're trying to make sensible decisions for the benefit of the group all the time.”

Regarding managing the busy December schedule, he added:
“We're trying. We made some changes on Tuesday night that were necessary, really. It's not going to be the same XI every game. Even on Tuesday, you could see the challenge for a couple of our younger players having to go Saturday, Tuesday in the Premier League is tough. 
 
“That was a challenge for us and we'd like to have one or two more available to rotate in a couple of those positions. But in general, we've still got a pretty healthy squad. I thought the substitutes came on and lots of them had a good impact on the game.  
 
“That's going to be important as well because if you do stay consistent with your team, it's unlikely that people are going to play 90 minutes and having good impacts off the bench is really important. I think we're going to need all those things.  
 
“We've got a really physical game coming [against Bournemouth on Sunday]. It was a really physical game in terms of the outputs on Tuesday night, to be fair. This is going to be a really physical game again. But having said that, they've also played on Thursday, so we need to take that challenge on with the whole squad that we have.”

McKenna was asked which areas he might look to strengthen in January with the areas where players are out long-term among those he plans to address.
 
“It's full focus on the next game at the moment, so that's where our mindset is,” he said.

“Of course, we'll try and improve the squad again, we’ve done that in the last couple of Januarys.

“We have some longer term injuries in the squad as well to important players, important positions and important profiles for us. So there are obviously areas, but we'll try to develop the squad as we have in every window, and we'll try to do that again.”

TWTD