Thursday, April 17, 2008

Injury bug

Chivas USA is suffereing from an array of injuries that will limit their roster for Sunday's game against FC Dallas.

If you read the story, you'll get the info on the players who were injured at the start of the week. Whether they play or not is really anyone's guess, and really all you can do is guess. If you rely on the Injury Report that goes with the match previews, you will probably be surprised come game time. The weekly Injury Reports are about the most useless things around.

Case in point: Maykel Galindo is injured. He did not start against FC Dallas nor did he start against Columbus, though he came off the bench in both games. He didn't play the entire game against RSL and told me afterwards about his injury. Yet he has not been listed in the injury report once this season. Not once!

Funny thing is, nobody is denying he's hurt. So is it an oversight? Probably. I seriously doubt any team is trying to purposely keep this stuff under wraps. Honestly, I don't know why they are not updated. I just know that they are not, and they are useless.

It would be more beneficial if the injury report was a real injury report, like the NFL. Take a look at this injury report from a random week last season. It lists the player, position, injury, practice status and game status. Now that is thorough.

But the one thing NFL pundits say about the NFL injury report is that it is kept so up-to-date because of gambling purposes. I mean, would you lay money on the Colts if Peyton Manning and Marvin Harrison were both out? That might be good to know before you plop down a couple hundred bucks on such a bet.

Still, regardless of gambling influence or not, MLS should have a more useful updated injury report, if nothing else so the fan can keep updated with as much info as possible. So that way when you tune in to the RSL-Chivas match and you know that Alecko Eskandarian is out because you read the pre-game match preview, you won't be surprised to see him play and score a goal.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Don't be fooled, the NFL injury reports aren't that accurate. If you look at the Patriots report from that same week, you'll notice that Tom Brady is "probable" with a shoulder injury. The problem is that he's been "probable" with a shoulder injury for at least two years. At this point it's a joke to them.

kevin n. said...

I was about to say the same thing anonymous, the NFL injury report might be very detailed but there's no governing body that makes sure they're accurate.

Plus when you use terms like "Probable", or "unlikley" to describe a players chances of playing there's no real way to prove a team is lying even if everyone thinks they are (like the brady incident).

Anonymous said...

I think Luis is point is that at least they are not hiding anything.

In the NBA they have no problem saying a player is injured and that he will miss X amount of time. MLS, however, seems to have an issue with that.

The NFL also punishes teams when they don't report incident or give out something they find out to be false.

Like when Mike Shanahan told a sideline reporter his quarterback would miss the rest of the game at halftime only to have that same quarterback start the third quarter. Or when the Patriots didn't report one time when one of their players didn't practice.

I don't think MLS has ever come down on teams for not being upfront with their injury report and that's why they are useless.

Anonymous said...

Mickey Mouse is what comes to mind when this happens regarding injuries. Ives had a blog entry (the old blog) where he discussed this as well.
http://njmg.typepad.com/sbi/2007/09/altidore-is-hur.html
How can you take a league seriously when this stuff happens? Where is the integrity?