No more tired excuses for England at Euro 2012

By ROB HARRIS

AP Sports Writer

Associated Press Sports

updated 12:36 p.m. ET June 7, 2012

KRAKOW, Poland (AP) -None of those old tired excuses this time, England.

Former coach Fabio Capello blamed England's second-round exit from the 2010 World Cup on a long Premier League season and an overly tired squad.

But ahead of the European Championship, Football Association medical chief Ian Beasley found no evidence to prove that his squad is any more exhausted than its rivals.

"Every time we go to a major tournament, everyone says, "Oh, the players look jaded,"' Beasley told The Associated Press. "The truth is, we don't really know ... because if you look at the statistics, you look that the Spanish players played more games than anyone else and won the World Cup.

"So it's not a straight line and that's the difficulty. What we don't understand is, are our games more intense than their games?"

Beasley said the Premier League seems to be a "different intensity" than La Liga, but no research backs that up.

"It's all guess work and dogma," the England team's senior doctor said. "Doctors are fantastic at dogma. So I could make it up and tell you whatever you like based on spurious stats."

Captain Steven Gerrard will not be blaming burn-out if England experiences another dismal tournament in Poland and Ukraine.

"It's an excuse - everyone else is in the same boat," the Liverpool midfielder said. "They all play tough games, they have tough seasons, they play cup finals, they play in Europe. I think using tiredness as the excuse is the easy way out."

Beasley cannot definitively determine that a winter break in England would produce an upsurge in the fortunes of the national team, which opens its Euro 2012 campaign against France on Monday.

"Cutting games and cutting exposure isn't on the agenda at the moment," he said.

Even if the Premier League replicated Germany and Spain by introducing a midseason break, Beasley said teams could use it as an opportunity to play lucrative matches abroad.

"They'd go to India for a friendly or whatever - you want to see the best players play (and) that's not cheap," Beasley said.

"We know the top players are playing more and more games, traveling here, there and everywhere preseason for obvious reasons, bona fide reasons," Beasley added. "If we all want to watch the best players, that costs money. And we are trying to mitigate those risks with good prevention strategies in an arena where we are playing every three or four days."

England's Euro 2012 plans have been heavily disrupted by a trio of key players being ruled out of the tournament through injury since Roy Hodgson named his 23-man squad last month.

Gareth Barry sustained a stomach muscle injury, fellow midfielder Frank Lampard picked up a thigh injury and defender Gary Cahill broke his jaw in a warm-up match. Third-choice goalkeeper John Ruddy was replaced in the squad after breaking a finger in training.

Much of Beasley's time is spent trying to develop enhanced recovery methods for the team.

"In the old days, it was all train, train, train," he said. "Now it's all how can we recover the players to be prepared for the match ... to decrease the load as much as we can."

Midfielder Scott Parker was an injury doubt after missing the last four matches of Tottenham's season with an Achilles' injury, but Hodgson has disclosed that a painkilling injection hastened his recovery to feature in warm-up matches against Norway and Belgium.

But concerns have been raised by FIFA about the dangers of using painkilling medication.

"Intervention is always bad if you don't have to have intervention," Beasley said. "And so, if you are taking medication unnecessarily, then that's not a good thing. And if you are taking it to mask symptoms then that it is not a good thing ... in the bad old days, lots of players used to play with injections. I hardly do it now."

Beasley stressed that the "aim is not to harm."

"We are always on the edge," he said. "And it's difficult to deny sometimes. But I have a pretty strong idea what I can and can't do."

That's down to medical advances and education.

"Medicine, imaging, x-rays, MRIs (scans), they have all come in now and we can actually diagnose things much more accurately which means we can give better advice and people aren't going to have an injection in their knee," Beasley said.

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Rob Harris can be reached at www.twitter.com/RobHarris

? 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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