SOFT-TISSUE injuries used to feature in the nightmares of club doctors, but all that could be changing.

One of the authors of the 2007 AFL Injury Report, Dr John Orchard, says hamstring and groin injuries now tend to be viewed as outside a doctor’s control, while the opposite is true with contact injuries.

“It’s interesting that when I was at club level … there was a view that the contact injuries were a little bit beyond your control as a medical officer but you had some control over the non-contact injuries,” said Dr Orchard, who has been convenor of the AFL medical survey in each of its 16 years and is a former club doctor at the Sydney Swans.

 “You took some sort of blame for the hamstrings and the groins that your team suffered.

“It’s paradoxical that at AFL level it seems like the opposite’s the case now.”

Dr Orchard said rule changes had greatly reduced the number of serious injuries – as Wednesday’s findings revealed – but a new problem area was emerging.

 “Unfortunately the non-contact injuries, the hamstrings and the groins, have seemed to elude us,” he said.

“We haven’t managed to make any impact on the rates of those injuries.

“There was a trend that we were observing in the middle part of this decade that they were starting to go down a little bit and we were very happy with that.

“Unfortunately in the last two seasons it’s seemed to move a bit in the other direction and move back up to the other levels that we were seeing about 10 years ago for hamstring and groin injuries.

“Certainly, we can speculate about possible reasons why they might have gone up in the last couple of seasons, but it is all speculation.”