Injuries, Football, Dowd, and more

Posted on March 29th, 2011 | by Tim in Arsenal,Arsenal News,Howard Webb,injuries,referees

Raymond Verheijen

You would be excused if you haven’t heard of Mr. Verheijen or if maybe you know of him as “that guy who tweeted something about Gareth Bale.” I admit that I didn’t know who he was until yesterday when I was listening to the Guardian Football Weekly Extra Podcast with James Richardson.

With no other news to cover, they touched briefly on the twitroversy Dr. Verheijen caused when he countered the media claim that Bale was injured in training with Wales on Wednesday. Working with the Welsh side, the good doctor defended their methods saying it couldn’t have happened because Bale didn’t train that day.

Yadda yadda yadda I thought and then the panel went into a brief look at Verheijen’s CV and it was quite impressive. Basically, he’s worked with every successful Dutch manager in the last 10 years or so, including stints at Barcelona (Rijkaard) and Chelsea (Hiddink).

Craig Bellamy has even hired him as his personal fitness coach and claims the man has worked wonders with his technique called “periodization.”

From what I gleaned periodization is simply that you can’t have a single training regimen for every player at a club. Some players, like van Persie and Arjen Robben (he claims) are explosive players and as such benefit from reduced training loads and working on different types of fitness that prepare their fast twitch muscled for load rather than endurance.

The idea of this completely blows me away — not because it exists, but because it’s apparently novel. This makes me wonder what the training regimen is like at Arsenal? Why is it that Cesc is still unable to recover from his hamstring injury? What caused Vermaelen’s achilles tendinitis? Was it actually a tendon that needed to be removed or was he over training as Dr. Verheijen might suggest?

I need to know! Unfortunately, he’s a big shot guy and I’ve sent him a request for an interview. We shall see what information I can get from here.

The thing is that you look at Arsenal and they currently top the injury list and it seems like Arsenal are perennial injury list toppers. Meanwhile, Gibbs has come down with another injury, Arshavin is being openly called fat and lazy and Arsenal are one or two calf strains away from having zero center backs. In fact, everyone on planet Earth knows that Arsenal need Cesc, Robin, Theo, Song, and Nasri fit the rest of the season if we have any hope of winning the Premier League.

Football v. Football

American football players are often accused of being lazy, out of shape, oxygen huffing, fat bastards and in my experience 90% of that is true. But ask most NFL fans if a wide receiver is fit enough to play for an MLS team and they will almost universally say that they could hands down. These are lean men, whose job is to run, of course they are fit, right?

Wrong.

Chad Ochocinco (yes, that’s his real name) tried out for an MLS team called Sporting KC (yes, that’s their real name) and even after several training sessions was still determined to be unfit to play for an MLS reserve team.

Here’s the video, could someone please get Ochocinco an oxygen mask?