Exclusive: Why Man Utd have suffered their injury crisis and what a 'thorough medical review' will look like

Manchester United qualified for the FA Cup final without players like Lisandro Martinez, Luke Shaw, Varane and Mason Mount. According to premierinjuries.com, their list of injuries includes 10 players and all four of the above-mentioned have been both back and forth several times already this season.

"No team has suffered more than Manchester United this season with regards to time loss injuries", premierinjuries-founder Ben Dinnery explains in an exclusive conversation with Tribalfootball.

"They have 38 time-loss injuries for the Premier League alone which puts them up there with Newcastle. It doesn't look great. However, we always like to quantify things in terms of minutes played and additional exposure as Manchester United are involved in a lot of domestic cup competitions and in Europe as well.

"So, when you look at those injuries per 1000 minutes played you will actually see that they are maybe fifth or sixth in the Premier League overall which is not as bad as some headlines suggests. But these injuries are almost a self-fulfilling prophecy," Dinnery elaborates on Manchester United.

"Your squad is stretched which forces you into making decisions that you ordinarily don't want to make with regards to risking players in certain games or field players in different positions which have different demands and different intensities.

"On top of that comes fatigue so there are two major red flags when we're looking at injuries. You have players who are being overused as they're playing two and three times a week regularly. Secondly, there is previous history and for that you just have to look at Luke Shaw," Dinnery points out.

"To expect a player like him to feature week in and week out would almost be foolhardy. Over the last few seasons, you may be looking at a 50 or 60 percent availability record from Luke Shaw. But injuries are a multifaceted issue, and if there was a simple fix we wouldn't have any injuries.

"When you have a player like that, you audit everything from looking at how the players train, to looking at the pitches, to looking at footwear, how they sleep, their mattresses, their dentistry all the way to their diet. The difficulty lies in trying to pinpoint what it is affecting a player individually," Dinnery explains while also pointing in the direction of Eric ten Hag who has stated a complete review of Manchester United's injury issues is imminent.

"A review would also involve taking a look at Ten Hags' training methods as well as the intensity of it. Coming into a new club, there's going to be a period of learning and a period of adaptation for the manager because he hasn't played in the Premier League prior to this job with United.

"He might have observed from afar but he hasn't been ingrained in the day-to-day work of what it is like. The data tells us that there's no league in the world that can match the Premier League in terms of the intensity and the physical demands," Dinnery says before offering a take on what a "complete review" would include at the Carrington training ground.

"He will certainly be speaking with the medical staff and the coaching department. It's about looking at the types of injuries and the mechanisms of how and why did they occur. Don't forget that football is a contact sport and you will get injuries. It's about identifying those which are seen as avoidable.

"Sometimes you're just unlucky, but there will be other where you say, 'that shouldn't have happened', there was nothing to suggest that that player should have got an injury so somewhere along the line there's been a mistake or maybe even a little bit of mismanagement?

"You then look at things like, was his sleep disruptive, was it the intensity of the workload, did he play in a different position, was it his third game in a week. You know, a real deep dive into every individual injury to try and identify some kind of pattern or trend or understanding of the injuries occurring," explains Dinnery.

"Once you've gained that understanding, then you can start to address those injuries. We're not just talking about physios and sports scientists, it's about the whole background department coming together and working together holistically."

- Ben Dinnery was talking to Tribalfootball on behalf of Crypto Casino