Tom Piatak: "Injuries are pretty much in-line with other clubs"

27 July 2025

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Almost every press conference over the past few years, pre and post-match, has started with an update on the latest batch of injuries, with an apparent sense that Lady Luck hasn’t been too inclined to send some of her goodwill our way.

 

“The injuries were interesting because when you compare our club to other League Two clubs, our injuries were not out of line which, I'll be honest with you, kind of surprised me,” Tom Piatak revealed.

 

“But when I started to look and analyse that, which was part of the review we did, we were going through that because we did have a lot of injuries. But our injuries were not out of line with the other League Two clubs.

 

“Having said that, any injury is not good for the club. Some of that might be down to the fact we did all our training on one pitch. We're now trying to put plans together where the first team can go and play at the Sheepmount, or at least train down there as needed to keep the pitches fresh.

 

“Sophie [Birnie] has been doing a great job, and Greg Stebbings, of putting the information together of exactly where they are, medical and recommendations and all that, which is reviewed weekly with the football team. And we receive a copy of that so we can see what they're doing there.”

 

“Obviously the Charlie Wyke injury was a real blow to us,” he continued. “But I don't think our injuries were completely out of line with other teams, but any injury is going to hurt the squad and we're doing everything we can with monitoring it, treating it responsibly, but as aggressively as we can, so we’re not rushing somebody back, making sure they're fully healthy before they get back on the pitch, not pushing them.

 

“And hopefully we're going to see numbers go down. There's metrics that we've requested that we will be seeing to make sure we can monitor that as it's going forward.

 

“But the management team on the football side of the house is fully aware that we want to see this, we want to minimise it the best we can. My last email to them was - what else do you need to keep these players healthy or get them rehabbed as quickly as possible, please communicate that to me.

 

“Don't ask for the world but let me know if there's something critical that's missing, and we'll address it. So, we're monitoring that and trying to act on that as quickly as possible.”