Sal Paradise wrote:
I think most people on here accept the flooding at Kirkstall had an impact - the issue I have and many others on here is how the club coped with it and how they used it as an excuse when in reality the issues were far more fundamental than that.
By May the club should have sorted out the training/fitness/physio arrangements but the players still didn't look fit in fact that continued until the end of the season.
The fitness work you do in preseason is much different to the work you can do when the season starts and you're playing games on a weekly basis. So much time after a game is spent on recovery and getting bodies right for the next game, much different to the fitness work that take place in preseason. Our senior players will have been the last ones back to preseason and thus had the shortest time of all so no wonder why they were the ones dropping like flies picking up injuries, playing with knocks and looking unfit whilst the likes of Lilley and Keinhorst who started weeks earlier had good seasons in the circumstances.
The idea some have that because we lost 3/4 weeks of preseason, we should be OK by Round 4 and have caught up by then is completely wrong because once you lose that time in preseason you never get it back. Players who got injured early in the year obviously couldn't get fit and a number of players clearly had knocks that will have seen limited/unable to train during the week and thus again not able to get their fitness up.
The thing is as well no one is saying they handled it as well as possible and they've even admitted they could've done this and that differently. But it's not something they've had to go through before and not something they should ever have to go through again hopefully. It's okay to say other clubs had injuries and didn't struggle like Leeds (Leeds has had injuries before and not struggled to last year's extent) but none of those clubs had a depleted preseason so not comparable.
