Eddie Howe has been discussing the ongoing injury crisis at Newcastle United after three more Mags were forced off in Saturday's 4-3 win over West Ham.
Jamaal Lascelles has become the second player in the space of a week to be booked in for ACL surgery - he and Sven Botman will both miss 'six to nine months' - while Tino Livramento and Miguel Almiron were also forced off. It's feared Miggy will miss at least two to three weeks and Lewis Miley was also struck down over the international break.
Howe accepts that our "high-intensity style" and the physical nature of our play will sometimes contribute to injuries and fatigue, but insists that so many of our problems this season have been sheer bad luck.
We've sometimes rushed players back and taken risks - Botman clearly wasn't right and it's crazy that Lascelles tried to run off a serious knee injury - but we've also had so many freak injuries. Two dislocated shoulders (Pope and Murphy), three back injuries (Burn, Anderson and Miley) largely from heavy falls, Barnes' off-the-ball toe injury at Sheffield United and Wilson damaging his pectoral muscle after a fight for the ball at Forest.
Speaking about the latest injuries, Howe said - “I always think there’s no such thing as bad luck. I think you create your own luck. We play a really high-intensity style and a real physical game. Naturally, if we didn’t play that style and played a different way, the physical cost on our players would be less.
“But when you look at some of the injuries we’ve had this year, and we’ve analysed and re-analysed them, then for a lot of them, you can’t put them into any category other than bad luck, even though I don’t really believe in it.
“I could go through injuries and it has been a really strange one. Even on Saturday, that has been the case with some of the injuries we’ve got.
“I know some of the players have been away on international duty, and that puts an extra load on them, and I think you could see with West Ham, some of their players were going down as well. The speed of the game is definitely getting quicker, week on week.”
