doctor has patience for Cats' consistency
Jenny McAsey
The Australian
May 18, 2006
CHRIS BRADSHAW will find the medical rooms at Geelong almost empty when he takes over as club doctor this week after a two-season stint with Fulham FC in the UK.
Bradshaw certainly has wide-ranging experience. He was an elite athlete himself, competing in the decathlon at the 1990 Commonwealth Games. He went on to be the Australian athletics team doctor in the late '90s, overseeing the team at world championships and the Sydney Olympics.
He moved to the Richmond footy club for two years before taking the job at Fulham.
Surprisingly, Bradshaw believes sports medicine in Australia is ahead of the UK model.
"Soccer over here (England) is really old school and there are a lot of cultural changes that need to be made both at the medical and team level," Bradshaw said.
"In Fulham, as much as we tried very hard to influence the set-up, there are blocks in place to prevent you from changing things positively.
"On the whole they are certainly behind compared with best practice in Australia."
.... However, he warns such mid-season changes to key personnel can be dangerous.
"The one thing I've observed is that the best way to get soft-tissue injuries is to change your fitness coordinator or your coach, so there is a real challenge for whoever comes in to not change things too much and create an environment where you get injuries," Bradshaw said. He recalls when Allan Jeans took over from Kevin Bartlett as Richmond coach in 1992.
"Kevin Bartlett had been doing three hour-long sessions without too much speed, and Allan introduced 45-minute sessions with intensity, and you could almost hear the hamstrings pinging across the ground with regularity," Bradshaw said.
Watching from afar for the past two seasons, Bradshaw believes the game has changed significantly, which presents a new challenge for medical staff.
"The game seems to have got faster since I was last involved," he said. "The grand final last year was one of the most spectacular things I have seen for a long time with so much hard running. I thought it had come a long way."
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,19171209-36035,00.html
