By RICHARD BOOCK
New Zealand's injury-plagued cricketers are the worst casualties of an ever-increasing international programme.
Gilbert Enoka, the man in charge of the side's player rehabilitation programmes, said yesterday that the back injuries sustained by Daniel Vettori, Dion Nash and Geoff Allott were a direct result of the small pool of New Zealand players and the growing number of international fixtures.
While New Zealand's main problem against Australia this summer was its batting, the earlier loss of Allott and Nash and the later withdrawal of Vettori left the team with a makeshift and understrength attack.
All three suffered stress-fracture injuries in their lower spines in the past 12 months - Vettori's probably arising from overloading, and Nash's and Allott's from technical imperfections during their delivery stride.
"Until we reach a stage where we can rotate our front-line bowlers like Australia and other countries, it's hard to see anything improving," said Enoka.
"The schedule is continually growing, the burden's getting heavier and the pool of players - if anything - is getting smaller.
"It's a genuine problem because we all have responsibilities to these athletes," he said.
"We can't just treat them like raw meat."
New Zealand have been playing virtually non-stop since the 1998 Commonwealth Games and in that time every front-line bowler - including Chris Cairns and Simon Doull - has been forced out of the game by a serious injury.
Cairns was struck down by a calf-muscle tear and Doull by a knee condition.
Nash had a bone-scan a fortnight ago that showed some healing, but not at the rate desired.
Allott had a scan yesterday and was hopeful of receiving the go-ahead to begin light loading.
Vettori is still very much in the rest-and-recovery stage.
Vettori, the youngest spin-bowler in the world to have taken 100 test wickets, has grown 5cm in the past year and the spurt may have contributed to his injury, according to Enoka.
He said it was high time international cricket authorities addressed the issue by reviewing their scheduling policies.
However, New Zealand could help themselves by finding more bowlers to share the load.
High Performance Centre director Dayle Hadlee said yesterday that New Zealand Cricket were taking every measure to reduce the number of back injuries and to retrain those with "at-risk" actions.
He said the underlying problem was that bowling was an unnatural action requiring the bowler to sprint at full pace and then stop suddenly on the point of an extended and locked front leg.
"This means you're absorbing a strain of something like eight times your body weight at the point of delivery and unless your feet, hips and shoulders are all in sync, then there can often be problems - especially in the lower lumbar."
The former New Zealand opening bowler, who bowed out of cricket with back problems in the early 1980s, rejected any suggestion that stress fractures were new to cricket because, he said, they had almost certainly plagued bowlers since the game began.
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