I have been writing in the past about injuries. I even wrote a whole series in which we looked at the different types of injuries that Arsenal players had suffered. One of the debating points was of course when an injury is caused by contact or not. I remember some not agreeing with some of our interpretation of the numbers in some cases. In this article in particular I talked about the hamstring injuries. And nobody really challenged the fact that I said that hamstring injuries are almost certainly always caused by non contact issues.
Now I must say that at the time I had my doubts when we talked about that type of injuries. I am not saying that all hamstring injuries come from non contact but I am also very sure that a lot of those hamstring injuries come from contact.
And sometimes even small contacts that seem unimportant at the time of the contact can turn out to be important. A kick at the wrong time on the wrong part of a muscle can cause some small damage that will get bigger later on.
And that is exactly what happened with Alexis. In the match against Dinamo Zagreb he got a kick on his hamstring early on in the match.
In fact the Dinamo Zagreb player knew he had made a bad tackle and immediately apologised to Alexis and urged his team mates to play the ball outside the field.
