Bulletin

Issue: November/December 2006

News

Bowlers also feel the pain

Next time you wince for the injured heroes of your favourite football team, spare a thought for Australia’s Test cricketers, who also suffer for the glory of their game - with batsmen and fast bowlers bearing the brunt of the pain.

They may not offer the gladiatorial spectacle familiar to AFL fans as Big Men fly, tackle and crash, but they do suffer long-term and painful injuries. La Trobe University physiotherapist and former Coordinator of its Master of Sports Physiotherapy course, Alex Kountouris, bears exclusive witness to that.

Recently appointed Australian Team Physiotherapist by Cricket Australia, it is his job to manage the injuries, mitigate the pain, and where possible prevent it - a round-the-clock job when the team is on tour, as it is approximately six months of the year.

A soft job compared with, say, a football physio’s? “It’s different. AFL goes for 90 minutes, our matches go for 30 hours - so they go for five days straight,” says Mr Kountouris.

“The perception is “how can players get injured playing cricket?” I can tell you there’s not one day where I’m not working six, seven, eight or nine hours a day trying to fix up injuries.”

“Players being hit by the ball, they’re the obvious ones, the ones people see. The ones they don’t see are the sore backs, the tendonitis going on in their shoulders, their knees, their ankles causing pain. The internal injuries you can’t see, they’re the ones I treat the most.”

“Every game there’s something going on with most of the players, from sore hamstrings to breaking a bone. The most common is over-use injury because they’re doing the same thing repeatedly, bowlers in particular. Fast bowlers suffer a lot because they can bowl 30 to 40 overs in a couple of days and then take a half-day break and go back and repeat it all.”

Seven years as official physiotherapist to the Sri Lankan cricket team and three as back-up physiotherapist to the Australian team before taking up his fulltime appointment, Mr Kountouris and his eight suitcases and fold-up table are now a familiar fixture among Australia’s touring cricketers.

He loves the job and shares the pain, strain and euphoria of being part of the national team, but when players are injured, he faces some of his toughest calls - whether or not to take them out of the game.

“The worst thing you have to do is send a player home when on tour. If a player gets injured, you have to make a decision whether the injury will recover in time to continue the tour.”

On a two-year contract with Cricket Australia, Mr Kountouris is continuing his casual teaching responsibilities at La Trobe, lecturing in cricket-related injuries to post-graduate physiotherapy students.

He is also pursuing a research project through the University funded by Cricket Australia to evaluate the link between bowling techniques, muscle asymmetry and stress-fracture injuries in the lower spine among young fast bowlers.

“The hypothesis is that the ones who get stress fractures will have muscle asymmetry. If you’re a right-arm fast bowler, the muscles on the right side will be much bigger than those on the left, either because the muscles are trying to stabilise the area, they’re overworking, or it’s something to do with the player’s technique - the way they bowl, or the way the twist their trunk - that’s causing that muscle to pull on the bone causing it to break.”

“If we can confirm this, we would then hopefully be able to prevent it.”

The work has implications for fast bowlers, gymnasts and tennis players, and because these injuries are common among young cricket players, for how they are coached.

For Ricky Ponting and his Australian team it may be shutting the gate after the horse has bolted - their physiotherapist says most of the fast bowlers would have sustained stress fractures in their youth - but not for the future of cricket.

Because his research seeks to identify risk factors in 13 to 18 year olds, he says it aims to ensure the best bowlers will still be around at the age of 20-plus - with a chance of being selected for the national team.