United boss Paul Simpson revealed at Tuesday night’s forum that the almost unprecedented number of medium to long-term injuries suffered by the squad had last season had led to an increase in insurance costs for the coming campaign.
And that had prompted an internal review, which looked at everything from training and recovery to match day travel.
“It was an exceptionally high season but, to be honest, it was in terms of all injuries,” he said. “The insurance has gone up because we absolutely smashed it last season with the shocking time we had with bad injuries.
“We have looked into it, Chris [Brunskill] the physio did that, and we’ve found that over the whole of Europe there was a 30 odd percent increase in hamstrings.
“We normally see six a season, we had eight, and we also had three cruciate ligament injuries that we were dealing with from the season before.
“We've looked at everything - train travel is a solution but also a problem with getting back to Carlisle. The last departure from Euston is 6.30pm, which is no good.
“We're trying to weigh up the benefit of going down on a train, we did that for the Sutton game and the players did feel the benefit. It comes down to costs, because the bus still has to come down to meet us, so it's extra cost. We're talking to Avanti about it - I should say that our secretary Sarah McKnight is on with that.
“But hopefully next season we won't have as many injuries to contend with. At times we were down to 65% player availability, then we got to back to 90. Amazingly we had 100% availability for Wembley!”
“With the players we’re also looking at how we’re screening them,” he continued. “On match day plus two we’ll be looking to see how they’ve slept, how they are, how stiff they are, what their flexibility is like, a number of things will be monitored closely.
“We're looking to improve our performance department to help with that, and that's something else we'll look to achieve over time.
“Depending on the findings it could be that players may be required to sit out of certain sessions, depending on the results of that monitoring.”
“Last season we lost 25% of available minutes across the whole season for injuries,” chief executive Nigel Clibbens added. “We need to get that lower, because it's up 50% on a normal season.
“These are things we’re aware of, and we want to mitigate it as much as we can. The monitoring that Paul is setting up will certainly be a positive part of that.”
