REVEALED: The damning data and facts behind Portsmouth’s ‘injury crisis’ under Danny Cowley

‘If the driver takes the car out in Formula 1 with reservations from the mechanics, then proceeds to crash the car on the first corner without warming up the brakes and tyres, that is not the mechanic’s fault. If the driver then goes out and does the same thing again, but this time blames the mechanics - that beggars belief. You can read into that what you want and which players I’m talking about, but that is how I see it. That’s how it is.’

Pompey’s award-winning medical and performance team have taken a battering this term in the face of veiled criticism, innuendos and, indeed, public condemnation amid the spate of injuries which have afflicted the season. Former boss Danny Cowley’s press briefings had much to do with that, striking an increasingly exasperated tone as the problems mounted up and key men were sidelined. The finger was never explicitly pointed, however.

The medical and sports science teams kept their counsel through the criticism which followed, but the shadow has hung over their standing since. A department who’d nursed Pompey through a record 62-game campaign with minimal issues four years ago, was now being called out for not being up to the job.

So now the time has arrived to erase the smear: with cold, hard facts and data.

‘We had the first season in League One with Kenny (Jackett) in which we were putting demands and practices in place.’ explained first-team physio Jack Hughes, who oversees data in the medical department. ‘The data then shows that there was a decline in the total number of injuries, as well as training injuries.

‘We got training to a good place where the drivers were listening to the mechanics, if you like. That meant that our training injuries were minimal and contributed to fewer total injuries. Match injuries were pretty consistent, but you expect that at any level of football. You expect in matches to get injuries because of the chaos, but our figures were fairly consistent.

'We got to a good place where we were preparing them for matches without picking up more injuries in games, having reduced training injuries. We were successful in that period, even though we had a lot of fixtures to contend with. We had 62 games with the same group of players and minimal injuries. In that season Chelsea played one more, if you include the Community Shield.

‘The management changed in the March of 2021 and the figures are a little skewed, because the mindset was to just get through the games (in the Covid period). Then in the first full season we saw the numbers start to sky-rocket not just in terms of total number of injuries, but injuries in training. It got to the point where our number of injuries in training started to meet the number of injuries in games. We’d never seen that before.

‘It was the cost. If the training injuries spiked to 12 and the match injuries came down to six, you’d say “fair enough, the training was reducing the match injuries”. It was the fact the total number went up: we were burning it from both ends. That season (2021-22) was a lose-lose - then we get to this season where the numbers have again been high.’

Last season’s Spanish training camp and pre-season campaign saw an unprecedented spike in injuries through the current medical and performance team’s six years at PO4, which they believe raise questions of Pompey’s training methods. The pre-season injury numbers in their time at the club numbered three (2017), one (2018), two (2019) and three (2020). After the managerial change the numbers shot up to seven (2021) and a new high of eight last summer.

Bacic added: ‘Pre-season has to be tough and hard, because you have to get your conditioning for the long campaign ahead, but what you don’t do is muller them and break them in pre-season. A few will fall by the wayside, there is always a little bit of collateral damage for whatever reason. Every club will accept that and I’m talking for every physio up and down the country.

‘You have to have a pre-season with a body of work. Two or three injuries you can handle and accept, but when you’re getting sevens and eights and the majority are soft tissue injuries then something isn’t quite right. When you have chosen to do that pre-season with an outside injury prevention specialist who you’ve worked with before and then get that many injuries - you maybe have to have a look in the mirror rather than out the window.

‘Any club can have a bad year, an annus horribilis. Sometimes though you can Google people and they have an injury crisis wherever they are. No one has a perfect record with injury prevention, but our record stands up to inspection. The numbers are there - these are the cold, hard facts.’

If the previously unreleased data shines a very different light on the events of this season, the trends since Mousinho’s arrival in January make for much more positive and reassuring reading for Pompey fans.

Head of sports science, Jeff Lewis, reports much-improved figures for running distances with higher speeds, sprint distances and numbers - all with fewer players falling by the wayside. The trends are now headed in the right direction, while the medical and sports science believe the players are buying into the methods of the new regime.

‘John being an ex-player who has recently stopped playing helps,’ Bacic added. ‘There’s an understanding of the players - and what players need.

‘Also we’ve been heavily backed by the club’s owners, which has allowed to access the leading edge of sports science and medicine usually only available to Premier League clubs.

‘There’s an empathy from John, it’s just listening really and understanding. There’s a trust from the players towards someone who’s played the game - both John (Mousinho) and Jon (Harley). They are very clued up and tuned in - and then there is the feedback from the players.

‘If you’re a player who’s been pushed back in, then you get a lack of trust from the players towards the management staff. Then it’s easier to stay in the treatment room a little bit longer, because they are worried how they are being cared for. What are their expectations for when they get back to training?

‘We’re trying to have a smooth transition from the physio department to outside with Jack and Jeff in training which is modified and then back into full training. There’s a build-up and a process - you just can’t cut corners and take risks with that process.’