Winter Sports - Football
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It’s hard to reach the balls as you never know how they will bounce. Both teams have the same problem, but of course it affects the game
Nadine Angerer, Germany Women’s International Goalkeeper
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“Some studies show a small difference in the injury pattern, with an increase in ankle ligament injuries on synthetic turf, but a decrease in muscle injuries.” It seems then, that when scientifically tested, there are no significant injury risk increases in synthetic turf. It must be noted however, that the studies only focused on injuries that caused absence from either training or matches: “There may have been sore muscle or back pain issues that were not part of the studies, but which were reported by some players and teams.” Also, there have been no studies on the long-term impact of playing on synthetic pitches or on the differences in the quality of the synthetic turf. But it does seem that, for now, there is no scientific evidence to blame the synthetic pitches for injuries suffered whilst playing football.
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The photograph that USA forward Sydney Leroux tweeted a couple of years ago would argue otherwise. Under a picture of her grazed, friction-burnt legs, she wrote; “This is why soccer should be played on grass!” I
I've coached for twenty- seven years. My first fifteen years, I never heard anything about this. All of a sudden cancer seems to be in a stream of kids
Amy Griffin, Head Soccer Coach, University of Washington
personally have never seen a grass-burn that has quite the same skin-melted properties as Leroux’s image, or others I have viewed online (I wouldn’t recommend typing it into Google images, just take my word for it). But then, of course, the scientific evidence surely speaks for itself.
So what, I hear you ask, if the footballers get grazed a bit more severely? Maybe it would stop them from their ridiculous dives after near-fatal wafts of air from the opposing team? But what if the pitch reached a scorching temperature of 49O
“ ” C, as
it did before the opening match of this year’s Women's World Cup? At more than twice the air temperature, this raised serious concerns for the welfare of the players. It is not only tough on players’ feet, but can cause extra fatigue. Studies conducted by Penn State’s Centre for Sports Surface Research in Utah found that surface temperatures of synthetic turf were generally 20O
C to 30O C hotter than natural grass, with the highest temperature recorded
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Whenever you see a preponderance of one kind of cancer, that’s when you worry. Goalies are ‘in the stuff’ all the time, so they are actually more exposed
Nancy Alderman, President, Environmental and Human Health
in research of 93OC (200O F)! No wonder then,
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that there is a chance of discomfort, dehydration and heat stroke. The same study also looked into the mechanisms that are often used to cool the turf before play, concluding that the popular wetting of the pitch does reduce the temperature, but only for a short period of time, with one study by McNitt et al. in 2008 showing that temperatures rebounded just twenty minutes after watering. At five feet above the surface, the air temperature above the synthetic turf returned to almost that of the natural grass surface, but that doesn’t help for anything much, other than the player’s head and maybe shoulders. Aside from the potential fatigue caused to the athlete, concerns have been raised about the material that makes up the shock absorbing infill of the synthetic 3G pitches. 400,000 or so reclaimed rubber tyres are used for each pitch, crumbled up and used to fill the gaps between the plastic grass. An ingenious idea at the time it seemed, as the
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