Deano & Dalian's Umbrella

Normally, return to play from PCL surgery is not dissimilar to the time for ACL surgery, so around 6 months plus. So that would be unusual. For PCL injuries managed conservatively (without surgery), return to play is more like 4 months but I just googled and that player did have surgery and there are articles saying he had a "cruciate" injury but I can't find anything more than that or details of the surgery. Given that PCL injuries often don't require surgery, I'm wondering whether the surgery he had was to deal with a lesser, associated injury like a meniscal tear and the PCL tear was left alone. Otherwise, and I hope you don't mind me saying this as I'm part Greek myself, the crazy Greeks just let him go back too quickly and hoped for the best.

This is complete guesswork but we now have Wilson happy to say that Mings has an ACL injury but not happy to disclose (other?) details which means that Wilson is either worse than me at keeping secrets or there are additional details he isn't saying. Combined with the official site saying it will require "lengthy rehabilitation" whereas for Buendia, it said 6-8 months which is the standard thing the physio and doctor would tell the manager for an ACL, this makes me suspect that Mings has injured additional structures which need reconstructing. The most likely candidate would be a collection of structures known as "the posterolateral corner". If someone has this and the ACL reconstructed together, return to play could be more like 1 year.

Just on that bit - about 80% of ACL injuries are complete ruptures with about 20% being partial (that's just off the top of my head) It doesn't tend to be like other ligament injuries where you rate them on a 3 grade scale (1-microscopic tearing, 2-macroscopic tearing / incomplete rupture, 3- complete rupture). The fact that we saw the knee sublux (move out of place) and the fact that he needs surgery both mean it is a complete rupture.

I would say almost certainly not as you would normally only injure that by a severe blow to the tibia or a severe hyperextension. But what can be more common with ACL injury is: meniscal tear (not the end of the world) "bone bruise" - microfractures of bone under the cartilage - not a big deal in the short-term. an osteochondral fracture (piece of bone and cartilage comes away) - - bigger deal but possibly not the end of the world. Injury to the structures at sides of the knee which prevent rotatory instability - collectively called things like the "posterolateral corner" and "posteromedial corner" (this includes the medial ligament - MCL) . Now you have a knee which is not just unstable from front to back (the sagittal plane) because of the ACL rupture, but you now have one that is unstable in multiple directions. You have to also reconstruct these structures or otherwise the ACL reconstruction will fail due to the additional rotatory forces on it. Rehab from these reconstructions is a lot slower and a lot more fiddly because there are lots of things you can't do for a while to avoid strain on these structures. This is where MRI comes into its own. As you can see, it is not that difficult to diagnose an ACl injury from your armchair watching sky sports - these other structures are more difficult to assess with any certainity.

You are right that this is similar - you can also see the "pivot shift" mechanism here. When you rupture the ACL, the femur (thigh bone) moves out of place on the tibia (shin bone) but the bones suddenly clunk back into place. With Owen, his foot is still on the floor so his femur clunks forwards. With Mings, his foot was coming off the floor so his tibia clunks backwards. The term "pivot shift" is normally used to refer to a test that surgeons do to produce this clunk and diagnose ACL injury but the same clunk is what you are seeing here. I'm probably going overboard here, but just in case anyone is interested, here is an article about what causes or stops a pivot shift. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00167-011-1866-5

This is a really difficult one. I'm always amazed when people who have ACL surgery and so long out do come back at such a high level. If you just read the "abstract" (summary) of this study, you'll see that players often do not return at the same level as before , although a word of caution is that this involves data going back to the mid 90s. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0968016018302187 Mings' physique and fitness is a definite plus. His age is against him in terms of it then taking time once back to try and gradually get back to where he was. But the biggest factor will be injuries to other major structures rather than just ACL - you are then entering Wesley territory.

It has normally been comments inferring that I'm just someone on an internet forum pretending I know what I'm talking about, to the tune of "it's amazing how many sports medicine experts we have on here". I'm not asking people to take what I say as gospel but when you're just trying to answer someone's question, it can be a bit annoying to be accused of making it up.

Although about 15 years ago people were messing about with getting people back in 4 months, it seems to have gone back to more what it was before then which is 6-8 months. I am a bit cautious so would be aiming for back to training at 6 months and playing at 8 but people have got back in 6. However, I was surprised by how much pain Mings was in, which could suggest he has done more than his ACL. If other ligaments have been badly injured, it is going to be longer than that. I would like to know how quickly his pain settled down because ACL injuries normally hurt when you do them but can settle relatively quickly because the ligament is completely ruptured and there is nothing to "pull" when you move. . Okore is an example of many who go back on and try to continue. The final thing is that the irony is that there are professional athletes who have coped without an ACL and didn't need surgery and came back much quicker. In the past, there were tales of New Zealand all blacks with no ACLs and I heard from someone at Wolves that one of our ex-players in the 80s/90s went in for a small knee operation only to find out he'd ruptured his ACL at Villa and never knew. And he was pacey and a dribbler. The problem is you can't predict accurately who doesn't need surgery and clubs won't risk several months of rehab to then have a player need surgery anyway, so all pro athletes have ACL surgery now whether they need it or not.

Because there are predisposing factors to ACL injury, many of which you can do nothing about, it is not uncommon for someone who has done one ACL to do the other - so some people are just at more risk of ACL than others. I have seen a paper where people who had one achilles rupture were more likely to rupture the other one. The theories put forwards for this were either genetic predisposition or the likelihood that if you have degeneration in one limb, you are likely to have it in the other one too: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1600-0838.2004.00344.x So to answer your question, in both cases you are at increased risk of doing it again but tendon injury is more preventable with common sense about not doing too much too soon.

This is a difficult one because if you scan the tendons of most athletes, there will be some degree of degeneration and many will have no symptoms and no problems ever happen. But if someone is complaining of tendon pain or discomfort, you definitely should investigate it and get an ultrasound scan - then pain plus degeneration is a warning sign. As a more preventative measure, you shouldn't hammer people in in pre-season or when they first come to the club and build up their training load gradually. From what I hear just as a fan, there seems to be lots of emphasis on managing training load these days, so hopefully Carlos was allowed to bed in gradually when he arrived.

You're welcome and sorry for the defensive mini-rant either side of it.

I swore I would never post on here about injuries again because I get so many sarcastic replies but when someone asks a question, I like to answer so: 99% of the time, this is a one-off acute injury that is not something waiting to happen. The injury might look innocuous to you but the position that Mings' knee went in to - dynamic lower extremity valgus (knocked knee position) is the most common mechanism of injury for ACL injury. And you can tell it is an ACL injury from how his knee joint moved out of place and then suddenly clunked back into position (called the pivot shift phenomenon) The cases I know of where this injury was an accident waiting to happen is where people have gradually and repeatedly stretched the ACL out over time by hyperextending (over-straigthening) the knee. A famous case is Tiger Woods who used to purposely snap his knee into hyperextension when driving (a golf ball not a car) to get more distance and eventually it stretched out that much it was useless. I also had a kickboxer patient who did the same on both knees. Having said that, there are a number of proposed and not entirely well-understood risk factors that can make someone more predisposed to ACL injury (women in particular). These can involve anatomical variations and muscle imbalances and biomechanical variabilities. Given that FIFA have an exercise programme to try and reduce ACL injury risk that has been used with kids for years, I'm sure efforts would be made by the medical and coaching staff to minimise the risk of such injuries so I wouldn't put any blame there. Finally, to ward off the usual sarcastic responses, I have degrees in physiotherapy and sports medicine, have worked as a physio at Villa and other clubs, and have published several papers on ACL injury in different journals including the British Journal of Sports Medicine. I have not wanted to say this before but last time I posted about Carlos' injury and said tendon ruptures were, unlike ACL injuries, not one-off bad luck injuries but caused by overuse and degeneration, nobody would have any of it, so that is why I'm saying it now.

It is 100% an anterior cruciate ligament injury. You could clearly see what is called the "pivot shift" phenomenon where the thigh bone (femur) moves out of position on the shin bone (tibia) and then suddenly reduces (clunks back into place). The only good news is that he and Emi can rehab together and encourage each other.

I thought the same but then realised that the OP is from the US and this is the correct spelling there.

Not guilty by reason of insanity.

He was a really nice guy.

Sorry, I just saw the imminent bit. If he can still do that, that's fine.

I don't think we should be signing someone who can't get it up. He can't be that healthy.

Sky and the Guardian are both saying that the BBC have this evening reported that: " Huw Edwards is facing “yet more allegations of inappropriate behaviour” this evening. The new accusations are that he behaved inappropriately towards colleagues at the BBC." But I can't find this on the BBC

And why is everyone going out of their way to not mention the gender of the 4 "complainants"? (I know one isn't complaining) Where I've seen incidents of people accidentally letting it slip, they've immediately jumped to correct themselves and say "or young woman".

My point wasn't that you could find out who it was this way, but rather that someone in the "press" had actually taken the plunge, even though widely-held opinion is that the person has only been named on social media and not by any media outlets (if you count a political website as "media outlet"). But you'd be surprised. Yesterday, I saw an AI-generated youtube video of the person in question talking about the story, which even included the arse photo, and from some of the comments, it was clear that people were still asking who it was and some people even thought the video was real. It did look real.

Guido Fawkes did an article yesterday where they as good as named them.

Ok. I'm a married man and I work in a position of responsibility and I'm a buddhist. So if screenshots of me on a webcam appeared with me naked and apparently wanking over a young lad, I'm sure my wife and employer would consider my actions immoral. And many people would consider me a hypocrite if I'd been expounding buddhist teachings. And my employer wouldn't want me to continue leading big events where we open our doors to the public. I think I'm going to go back to the Villa pages now. I'm not sure why I got drawn into this. I think I'm having a crazy day.

I can't answer this without pointing to the star's identity.

As the former editor of the Sun just said on the TV, given the particular position that this person holds at the BBC, they will never appear on air again because it will be deemed that they have acted immorally. They also let slip that this is not a daughter. I was also surprised that they said the Sun's biggest mistake was not printing the webcam screenshot many of us have seen. They must think it isn't fake.