Richard Boock: The ups - and the downs - of cricket

New Zealand Cricket is resigned to managing, rather than eradicating, the ongoing back problems besetting the national team.

With world champions Australia already looming on the horizon, New Zealand are scrambling for poise after news that two of their leading bowlers, Jacob Oram and Daniel Vettori, could be sidelined indefinitely.

Oram has a "hot-spot" in his vertebrae, the usual term that precedes the confirmation of a stress fracture, and Vettori is awaiting further tests after suffering back pain in the second one-dayer against the World XI.

The setbacks follows stress fracture injuries that drove Dion Nash and Geoff Allott out of the game, caused year-long layoffs for Vettori and Chris Cairns, and forced Shane Bond to seek reconstructive surgery.

Academy coach Dayle Hadlee, whose career was cut short by his third stress fracture injury in his back, said that while everything possible was being done to alleviate the problem, the condition was almost an occupational hazard.

"New Zealand feel the losses more keenly because there's a lack of quality replacements," he said. "But the fact is that all the cricketing nations are affected by stress fracture problems."

The injury could be the result of a combination of factors or just one critical defect, but Hadlee said an important factor was often the individual bowling action employed, in terms of whether it was safe or unsafe.

Bowlers were encouraged to remain side-on through their action or to be completely front-on, but taught that mixing the two would almost inevitably mean back problems at some stage of their careers.

He said assessment usually began with a bowler's back-foot landing, where the position of the heel on impact provided a clue on how the rest of the bowler's body should be positioned.

"If your back foot is parallel to the crease you've got a side-on action and you'd expect your hips and shoulders to be at 90 degrees and follow suit. "But if your back foot lands pointing up the wicket, a-la Malcolm Marshall, then you've got a front on action, and your hips and shoulders should both be open."

He said the problem usually began when a bowler employed a combination of both, meaning hips and shoulders rotating in opposing directions, causing counter-rotation and torque in the spine.

Hadlee's brother Richard was hailed for having one of the most pure side-on actions in the game, but most of the West Indian pace-bowling legends favoured the front-on style, as did South African work-horse Makhaya Ntini.

But according to a NZC report before the injury-ridden tour of England last year, most of the New Zealand bowlers picked had mixed actions to some degree, and were still vulnerable to back injury.

Hadlee said while the bowling action was a key factor, there were numerous other variables involved that made identifying the cause a complicated and wide-ranging process.

"You need to take into account the physical characteristics of the individual bowlers, things such as spinal curvature or low foot arches, abnormal body development [where the musculature is out of sync and there's an imbalance] and the physical environment in which they operate. It's important to also look behind the scenes at their preparation, posture, lifting technique, lifestyle, and diet."

While "old-timers" might think stress fracture injuries were a new condition, they had actually been around since the first days of overarm bowling, but used to be known as "a sore back".

"We knew nothing about stress fractures then, that wasn't the terminology. It was a bit like shin splints. Not long ago they were just sore legs - we didn't know any better."

While accepting the inevitability of back problems, Hadlee said NZC was doing everything in its power to reduce the number of bowlers who suffered from them.

"We've researched the problem locally and internationally; we've introduced under-age limitations for pace bowlers, we monitor workloads, and we employ technical surveillance programmes," he said. "We even send all our elite bowlers up to Auckland for a three-dimensional biomechanical analysis, which provides a lot of detailed information in terms of their action."