Aaron Ramsey: Is There Anything We Can Do, and Do We Really Need To?

The general reaction, rightly, to Aaron Ramsey's horrific injury is shock.

The emotions then take over, and we find ourselves blaming Ryan Shawcross for his injury. Bad challenge, late challenge, over the top of the ball, and any other symptom you could care to mention.

Once the initial dust has settled, we sit back and we evaluate, and the conclusion we come to is that this has happened to Ramsey, and to Eduardo, and to Diaby because people think that they can kick Arsenal to put them off their game.

The conclusion that is then drawn, quite logically, is that we should do something to protect Arsenal's players from this approach.

However, I have two questions that nobody seems able to answer. How and why?

How can we prevent this kind of injury cropping up once every two years? It's not an easy question to answer. Players already wear shin and ankle protection, which, since being made compulsory, has massively cut down on the number of serious injuries. It used to be five or six players every season. Now we're down to one every two.

It is key to remember that these athletes are at the top of their profession, the best amongst them earning six figure weekly pay packets. Their profession is a nation's passion, a physical battle between two teams of 11 men both aiming to win. They, both professionally and personally, want to win each and every weekend because their livelihood, quite literally, depends on it.

When people push themselves to their limits, accidents will happen.

Do we discourage players from going in hard by excessively punishing players that over-use force? This opens up a whole new can of worms for a number of reasons.

Firstly, how exactly do we define excessive force? It's an extremely subjective interpretation of a challenge, which would be impossible to consistently referee. Secondly, if we are going to just punish those players who cause injury to others, then that would prove to be a totally ineffective solution for two reasons.

Firstly, we have already seen the extent to which some players already artistically subvert the rules to get others in trouble with the referee. And secondly, such injuries happen so scarcely that most players will consider the odds of causing one so small that they will not change the way they play in any noticeable way.

If rule changes did come into effect with the desired effect, causing players to back out of or reduce the force of challenges, then we could actually see an increase in the number of injuries caused.

It is a well known, tried and tested mantra in Rugby, a game far more familiar with physicality than football, that the best way to get injured is to go into contact half- heartedly. The same must apply to football—a tensed leg is much less likely to sustain damage than a relaxed one.

So, given all the difficulties getting the desired result, should we be changing the way the game is played? Is there really anything that we need to change?

The question challenges the absolute fundamentals football. Who is to say what the correct way to play the game is? Teams are set an aim, and that is to score more goals than their opponents. Can we go about dictating to them exactly how they go about doing this without changing the very fabric of the game?

I have seem some respected journalists describe Stoke as "destructive," "vile," and "uninspiring," but who is to say that Arsenal's style of football is any more valid than Stoke's? At the very top level of football, it's a results game. The correct style is one that gets positive results.

In the modern game, winning the physical battle between two teams is one of the keys to winning over 90 minutes. This is an aspect of the game that Stoke are especially good at, and one that Arsenal struggle with.

This is a trade off. Arsenal win games through football, Stoke win them by fighting hard. There is nothing stopping Arsenal becoming more physical, but one would imagine their footballing side would suffer. This is why players who combine the two so well, like Didier Drogba, are in such high demand and worth millions.

The injury to Ramsey is tragic, more so because it is to such a talented player at the start of his career. However, one injury of this magnitude every two years is, far from being something to be ashamed of, a record that is not all that bad.

To paraphrase Josef Stalin, of all people, one injury is a tragedy, but ten injuries is a statistic.

That we feel so acutely the tragedy of Ramsey's injury is testament to how few and far between they are today.