With a 3 year contract, it's unfair to class Soliola as a risk at this stage. Sure he'll miss this season, but he may be fantastic for the next two and remain injury free.

Let's see what happens.

Isnt there a law/rule whereby if a player doesnt play for a certain period of time due to injury, the club can tear up his contract?

Or have I dreamt it?

You can tear up any contract any time you want. You just have to agree a pay off with the other party.

But as mentioned any attempts to get out of Sia's contract would result in black marks for the club when it came to future signings.

Quote ="Saddened!"You can tear up any contract any time you want. You just have to agree a pay off with the other party. But as mentioned any attempts to get out of Sia's contract would result in black marks for the club when it came to future signings.'" No. The poster above is right. You can 'sack' a player if he does not play for a period of time. Bradford did it with Tame Tupou. However i hope Saints are better than that. www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... Tupou.html

Quote ="Saddened!"You can tear up any contract any time you want. You just have to agree a pay off with the other party. But as mentioned any attempts to get out of Sia's contract would result in black marks for the club when it came to future signings.'" No. The poster above is right. You can 'sack' a player if he does not play for a period of time. Bradford did it with Tame Tupou. However i hope Saints are better than that. www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/rugbyl ... Tupou.html

I think the rules is only if the player ain't trained at the club for 6 months. Sia will be training by that time.

I think it's bit harsh saying, lets sack him as few have said on here. It's not his fault. We should find away of bringing another player in on short term deal if possible.

Over last few years we have wasted cap space with the likes of scully, cayless and now sia. All will be high paid players but thats rugby.

I like your logic!
The problem is that if he had given us two good injury free years followed by being out for a season, then its not the best result, but you can probably say that its not a disaster and you don't have to worry about the following season.

However, when the season long injury occurs in the first of the three years, you have got to worry and wonder about the wisdom of the signing especially as we are down to the bare bones in financial resources and he has "form" on the injury front.

I'm with Sants Fan on most of what he says in this post and in a minority, but if the best we can say about him is that he might have two good injury free years to come - well I wish I had your extreme optimism.

Put it this way, if he had been out all of last year with this injury, would we have optimistically signed him on a 2 year contract in the hope he would recover and be injury free?
We've signed him and hindsight is a wonderful thing, but I fear for the remaining two years and devasted that our team will be a lot weaker for the rest of the year
(bring back Gilly!)

Not sure. Best bet, ask Wigan about Karl Pryce

I don't think you need to be a doctor to read injury stats or to read what doctors write. I don't think he's suggesting he's done any of these operations himself do you?

I know they certainly didn't take a punt on a 50/50 call. I also know that the club - in the wake of the Trindall fiasco - sought advice on its methods of medical assessment prior to the finalisation of contract and that those methods remain under constant review in light of the best medical advice available. In other words - Saints are doing their best to make sure we don't sign a crock again.



No. But unlike you, I do bother to [url=http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/1249472-overviewdo some research before opening my mouth[/url.

I'm a bit late to this, but after reading this thread I am absolutely appalled by some of the unsupportive posts by some so called Saints fans. Can you imagine how devastated that lad is? What if he seen this thread-its not impossible. You wouldn't be like this if it was Eastmond or Roby that was ruled out.

Sia will be brewing all season now, kicking is heels, feeling absolutely gutted he can't play. He can do other stuff though, like going around schools inspiring young kids etc and settling more in a new country.
Next season, he'll be one hell of a player for us, and he'll want to make up for all the lost time sat on the sidelines.

Come on, lets be supportive. He's been very unlucky with injuries, but i'm confident he'll repay us with success in the next couple of seasons.

You've just made an assumption but when people are behaving OTT they usually do.

Since you're not a doctor, then, you have no more clue than you say - very graphically - that I do. Therefore I will show the same level of regard for what you say in this matter than you have shown for what I say.

Personally, I don't feel anything towards Soliola (other than general sympathy) because he has only played for us for about 80 minutes. Eastmond and Roby have grown up with Saints and the latter has been playing for a few years now at first grade. The two examples are entirely different.

What I'm not, is sentimental or melodramatic. Unlike some Saints fans.

Awful news for our season, but it's nothing more than bad luck. Hopefully Sia can recover fully for the next two years of his contract and prove his worth.

Surely only once we assess the full term of his contract can we judge whether he's been a waste of money or not?

that article you point to makes some interesting and perhaps pertinant observations:-

"Patellar tendon ruptures also can occur as a complication of total knee arthroplasty,1 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction using the patellar tendon as an autograft,2 or excision of chronic tendinosis."

"Ruptures also have been known to occur after local injection of corticosteroid near the inferior pole of the patella as treatment for patellar tendinitis (ie, jumper's knee)."


************
The above makes me wonder if the injury was on the same knee he had reconstructed, and was Soliola having Cortizone injections?

Once again SaintsFan, I'm with you..
Too many fans on here wanna pat him on his back & say unlucky!!
UNLUCKY! Read his injury list, he's 23!
This could be like Kieron Dyer of West Ham. 3 yr contract & never fit!

So if he isn't unlucky, then what is he? I don't understand your point.

Injury-prone maybe? Some players are; some players aren't. It may be sad for him - I'm sure it is - but likewise it may also be a fact of life for him: that his body, or certain bits of it, are just not up to the task of playing RL at the elite level. It's a shame for him but it could still be a fact for him. One question may be: is it also going to be a fact for us, having taken him on a three year contract? And if so, how long do we 'stand by him'?

The most pertinent and slightly worrying statement is:

[i"...Reasonable function can be obtained in most individuals, especially in the acute tendon rupture that is repaired immediately."[/i

"Reasonable" isn't the kind of adjective you want to hear in association with the word "athlete".

You cannot compare Wellens' apprenticeship and, say, Wheeler's. The former served his time alongside some of the finest backs in the club's history. Players who he could bounce ideas off, learn from - model his game upon. Wellens was given more time than most to learn his trade - in various positions (scrum half, stand-off, centre - I'm sure he even played on the wing and at hooker). The club could afford to drop him in for five or six games and then send him back to the juniors where he could put new skills into practice and gain confidence. Then a month or so later when injuries permitted he was back in the first team where the process began all over again. Which, if you ask anyone who has ever worked within a club's academy, is precisely the way a kid should be developed.

Guys like Lomax, Wheeler & Eastmond are doing it the hard way. Juniors excepted, this is the worst Saints backline in perhaps 20 years or more - where established pros like Meli and Gardner often make MORE mistakes than you'd expect from a junior. There is no acclimatisation period for these kids today. No extended periods where they are taken out of the side to perform in a less pressure-intensive environment. Indeed, Wheeler - a kid who must still lack an enormous amount of confidence after the appalling run of injuries he's had - may well be our STRIKE CENTRE.

There is just no comparison between these cases and any attempt to draw such must be regarded with dubiety.

He isn't unlucky because he is injury prone? I am completely lost now.

Yes I can within the context of the post to which I was replying.

[i"...Nah...nah...nah...nah...nah...I'm...sticking...my...fingers...in...my...ears...in...response...to...pesky...facts"[/i

I don't take any notice of you (other than for purposes of ridicule) because you are a demonstrable fool.

Despite not knowing ANYTHING about his prior medical history you just KNOW - via some weird process of INTUITION which you term "logic" - that it can ... no MUST ... make him more susceptible to knee injuries. I merely pointed out that in some cases of knee injury - ACL grafts - the joint is in fact left operationally stronger. To which you threw your teddy out of the pram and demanded to know my medical credentials (this is despite the fact that I made NO ASSUMPTIONS about Soliola's problems in the NRL).

I wouldn't be all that bothered if you did know the details of his initial knee injury, did bit of research on the matter (from credible sources) and then claimed he may be at increased risk (as Soliola may well be following his Patellar reconstruction). But no - you turn ignorance into a virtue and expect people to agree with "logic" that argues a player MUST be more injury prone after sustaining a knee injury - the details of which you know (and care) nothing about - and the treatment of which you know (and care) nothing about.



That - is what I call breathtakingly "naive".

Oh, and since you've chosen to backflip into skepticism, no longer accepting it's possible to make sound judgement on the merits of a player without holding a post-doctoral thesis on knee surgery, I take it you're now FORGIVING McManus' decision to bring him to Saints. After all, I don't recall him ever mentioning a side-line at the Fairfield arthroscopy centre.

And you are a sad, sad individual.

Calm down a bit won't you.

Without anyone being an expert on here, intuition and not anything else leads one to think that if you have any injury or disease, you are more likely for it to re-occur unfortunately.

Even if you ignore heart attacks, cancer, strokes etc (which are more like to occur after suffering from one of these than if you have never had had one of these); it is surely more likely that if you have a major physical injury either as a result of the injury or alternatively you were already "prone" to such an injury, you are then more like to be injury prone.

My brother in law has had all sorts of work done on his knee and his surgeon from Broadgreen who is apparently a leading light in this sort of surgery advised him that no matter what he did, the knee would always be weaker because of muscle compensatory action and wear from bone on bone interaction.
I'm not suggesting he had an identical injury to Sia but this is an indication of the body becoming weaker injury prone etc as a result of compensating for the inital injury and repair.

I've only done a bit of research but it would appear on the face of it that SaintsFan's fears have substance;
[urlhttp://journals.lww.com/jtrauma/Citation/1977/07000/Acute_Dislocation_of_the_Patella__Results_of.7.aspx[/url

This debate is a bit like the search for WMD in Iraq; everyone knew that they didn't exist but you can't prove a negative. In the end, intuition was right. Were most people REALLY surprised when nothing was found? Will most people be really surprised if/when Sia has further problems? I REALLY hope I am wrong but I don't think so.

I have no idea where you are going with this WMD stuff, or how you managed to connect the dots between it and Soliola. Let's try to keep the boundaries of this debate within site of the horizon.

Instincts are great. They are one of the main reasons behind man's unique achievements as a species. Without instincts our distant ancestors would be haplessly blundering into the salivating jaws of lions, crocodiles and sharks (assuming sharks do salivate) instead of sewing oats that eventually lead to us. Instincts allow us to make decisions and function whilst being in possession of only a small subset of information. The universe is an insanely complex place and even if we could stuff all the known facts into that two pound lump of goo stuck between our ears we’d be so paralysed with indecision it would be impossible to function.

Instincts are the result of a kind of sub-conscious computation of experience rolled in with information we've assimilated (perhaps through reading, or watching TV) that resides in long-term memory but is not directly accessible. When we read a book we tend only to consciously recall certain key details or themes, but the brain stores far more information than we think. The problem is it tends to bury it deep beneath the line of consciousness and often these memory fragments only become available through a kind of memory-to-memory association. Which is why we occasionally receive so-called "flashes of inspiration", where information we thought we'd forgotten suddenly emerges out of nowhere into thinking.

Unfortunately, instincts are not always reliable. Memory is a flawed medium that leads to a recreation of past events (warped by our character, personality, attributes and so forth) rather than accurate representation - which means that whilst instincts remain a useful problem solving tool, they can only ever be a poor substitute for facts derived from statistical data - otherwise known as sciencey-type stuff.

Whenever I hear the word "intuition", or "surely" as an appeal to reason (often in conjunction with - my personal favourite - "common sense"icon_wink.gif alarm bells start going off. Instinctual reasoning is a bad basis for logical thinking. B.A.D.

Returning to the points you have raised:

1. What evidence - other than your own intuition - are you offering to support the assertion that any surgically repaired injury must always be weaker?

2. Personal experience or the experience of a family member amounts to one case. Would you be happy to take an experimental drug which has been found safe in a trial consisting of a single test case?

3. Unless your BiL is incredibly well off it is simply not possible to compare the treatment he received with that afforded to professional athletes. The latter receive bleeding edge (and sometimes highly-experimental) treatment and rehabilitation that is several levels above the type offered by all but the most exclusive private healthcare plans. Professional athletes also benefit (greatly) from recuperating without the kind of employment/income stresses mere mortals such as us endure.

4. It goes without saying the body is an incredibly complex interconnected system of organs, muscles, bones, tissue etc. Given this complexity it is not feasible for any one surgeon to understand the anatomical and physiological nature of the entire body, which is why they branch into specialisation - general, neuro, cardio-thoracic etc. It is similarly unfeasible to argue (without any firm basis that I can see) that just because a particular body part behaves in such fashion after treatment it automatically follows that ALL body parts follow suit. It's like arguing that just because a damaged liver is capable of repairing itself, it automatically follows that if I chop off my finger it will grow back.

5. What do you mean by saying "injury prone"? How do you begin defining an injury prone player? I suppose you could start by saying something like "a player who suffers from injury repeatedly". But how do you know his teammate wouldn't suffer precisely the same injuries had he been put in his place? How do you know he wouldn't have suffered MORE injuries? What about a player who suffers a repeat of the same injury. Would you argue that that injury was "prone" to happen again? If so - how do you know the circumstances that caused that injury would not have induced the same injury in a player free of such prior injury? After all, a joint - whether it be repaired or not - can only tolerate a certain amount of force before it fails. Isn't it logically faulty to declare a player injury prone despite the fact that his knee was subjected to a degree of force that even the strongest of knees could not tolerate? You see how we're operating here under a veil of ignorance? Without facts, without evidence the whole notion of injury proneness is hopelessly defective.