Abstract

A comparison of significant injuries among the fifty players of an AFL football club and the fifty senior AFL umpires was made. As expected, the footballers had a larger number of injuries and missed many more games through injury. As previous studies have noted that the umpires and players run equivalent distances during a game, the injuries were divided into contact and non-contact injuries and again compared. The footballeers still had many more non-contact injuries than the umpires despite the similarity in the distances covered. In particular the number of muscle strains, especially of the hamstrings and quadriceps, was much higher among the footballers. The most likely explanation was the greater amount of sprinting performed by the footballers and the need to perform tasks such as bending, stretching and kicking while running at full pace. Other possible contributin factors include differences in flexibility, somatotype and weight training between the two groups. Verf.-Referat