PREPARATION is key to a footballer’s physical and psychological health. However, according to Jamaican international footballer Ricardo Gardner, sometimes even that is not enough.

Having made the trek to the FIFA World Cup in France in 1998 and having played in the English Premier League for several years, who better than Gardner to recount his experience as we approach the start of the 2014 World Cup in Brazil?

How did he feel before walking onto the field at the Greatest Show on Earth

in 1998?

“I just couldn’t wait to go out there and represent — wear the colours,” Gardner told the Jamaica Observer in an interview last Thursday. “There was no nervousness, I just wanted to get out there and play in front of the world.

“I was getting the opportunity to display the talent that I had been blessed with,” Gardner recalled. “I wore the colours knowing that I was not just representing myself, but the entire Jamaica at home and abroad — it’s such a great feeling.”

Through all his years on the field of play, the former Bolton Wanderers player told the Sunday Observer that going out on the field and performing at your best requires preparation and concentration.

“Trust me, you don’t have time to be thinking during the match, you just have to go out there and play the game in whatever way it comes at you,” Gardner said. “Your concentration level has to be at 100 per cent, because in a second things can change during the game, so your focus has to be at the top level.”

Gardner said preparation for a game involved anything that would boost the players, whether it was a massage or firing up their muscles.

“Normally, we used to have music playing in the dressing room to get that vibe going to go out on the pitch to play,” Gardner shared. “You have to think about the next game right away, so (after a match) you have to do recovery sessions — whether it’s an ice bath or warming down on the pitch or warming down on a bicycle in the dressing room.”

His time on the football pitch has not been injury-free.

“I have gone into games where I think I am 110 per cent fit and healthy and there goes a hamstring injury or I end up having a knee injury,” Gardner recalled. “It’s just a part of the game; you can do all the preparation there is, but once something occurs, there is nothing you can do but manage it.”

Head of the Division of Sports Medicine at the University of the West Indies, Mona, Dr Akshai Mansingh, explained to the Sunday Observer that physical football injuries can be acute or chronic.

Acute injuries, which may include a sprained ankle, strained back or fractured hand, are those which occur suddenly during activity, while chronic injuries are those that have been present for a while.

Dr Mansingh said to minimise the risks of being injured, leading up to a big event like the FIFA World Cup, footballers generally do not play as hard as they would in the actual match, avoiding moves such as slide tackling.

“Footballers try to maintain their health up to the big day,” Dr Mansingh said.

However, he shared that there will never be a squad that is 100 per cent injury-free and that physical, as well as psychological health, is really about proper management.

Explaining that it is really a “judgement call” by the medical team, which usually includes physiotherapists, doctors and psychologists, Dr Mansingh said one thing medical teams agree on is that no harm should be done to players, then they think about the team.

However, he believes that mental preparation is quite possibly more important than physical preparation, as playing in front of a home crowd is different from playing in front of the world and a crowd of possibly hostile fans.

He highlighted zoning and imaging as two of the mental techniques employed to prepare players. Zoning, Dr Mansingh said, helps players block certain things, allowing them to focus only on the field of play, while imaging, which is done before matches, helps players prepare for the match through them imagining themselves playing the game.

Meanwhile, chairman of the Jamaica Football Federation (JFF) Medical Committee, Dr Guyan Arscott, identified some of the most common physical injuries plaguing football players.

Probably the most common injuries suffered by footballers is around the ankle. They can have an ankle sprain, which is very common, or they can have more serious injury to the ankle which occurs when the foot rolls under the player. When that happens, it puts some stress or strain on the ligaments, particularly the outside. There is a well-known tackle that is called the slide tackle — that is one of those contact tackles that can cause the foot to roll under and result in this injury.

The next set of common injuries occurs around the knee, the most feared one being the common Anterior Crucial Ligaments (ACL). This can be torn partially or completely and it may occur with direct or indirect injury. Footballers can get a blow or they might be involved with some kind of twisting or pivoting motion and this can cause serious injury to the ACL. This is a very important ligament to prevent movement of the lower leg against the thigh, so when they have a sudden change of direction, it can stabilise it. About 70 per cent of this injury can take place without the player coming into contact with another player.

You hear more about hamstring injuries with athletes, but it also occurs in footballers, and it can occur without impact. For example, if the footballer is sprinting or making a sharp acceleration, he can tear the hamstring. Sometimes you can hear a cracking sound when they pop, because they are a very powerful group of muscles. Fortunately, most hamstring injuries can heal and players can return to competition.

Sometimes footbllers get injuries in the hand by falling or by rreceiving a blow, damaging the small bones in the hand called the metacarpals.

The area that sometimes startles doctors is head injuries. Fortunately, the most common head injury is a concussion and when they have contact and the head is involved, it is the most important thing to exclude as they may appear okay… And if they have a concussion injury there is the additional difficulty of deciding when they should return to the field of play. Clearly you can have a concussion without losing consciousness, it can be subtle. Concussion injuries are very important because they affect memory, concentration powers, and the ability to problem-solve, which is needed on the field of play, even if they haven’t lost consciousness.

Dr Arscott told the Sunday Observer that there are a set of exercises known as the 11+ which FIFA published. These help to strengthen joints. He said, though, that once a player is injured, the mantra to treating injuries is PRICE — protection, rest, ice, compression, and elevation.

Dr Arscott said nutrition and rest are also imperative to a football player’s health and that when players go on the field tired and fatigued, they are more prone to injuries.