WITH seven AFL players already having succumbed to season-ending knee injuries four weeks out from the start of the season, it is fair to ask: is the problem getting worse?

Not so, says sports medicine expert Professor Peter Brukner.

In fact, with Nick Malceski, Paul Hasleby, Mitch Brown, Brad Dick, Kristin Thornton, Nathan Grima and Rhett Biglands already facing full knee reconstructions, the statistics indicate that we are simply on par with last year, when 12 AFL players tore their anterior-cruciate ligaments, seven of those in the pre-season.

At this stage, 2008 is technically one better than in 2007 as Biglands' injury is actually a complication from an injury he sustained in 2006, rather than from training or match practice this year.

However, there is still almost a month to go before the season begins.

Seven ACL tears in four weeks does not mean that players can be expected to keep dropping at a comparable rate throughout the season, Brukner said.

"For every year that they've been keeping stats, half of them occur pre-season or in the first month of the season," he said.

"We're not exactly sure why they happen pre-season and early in the season. It may have something to do with the hard grounds, it may have something to do with the fact that their bodies are not used to competition," he said.

The AFL was drawn into this argument yesterday, when football operations manager Adrian Anderson defended the use of regional grounds to stage practice matches in the pre-season, saying there was no evidence that this contributed to the incidence of ACL tears.

Brukner concurred with this view, saying that not one of the studies that have looked into the matter have been able to reliably determine the reason for the frequency of such injuries at this stage of the year.

He also said he was sceptical about Malceski's attempt to fast-track his recovery through surgery that will replace his ruptured ACL with a synthetic ligament.

"There is not a lot of evidence that I can find that shows that it improves things," he said.

"They were using similar things in the '80s — it was a different material (gortex), but it's the same principle — basically using an artificial ligament to act as a skeleton within the knee (but) it was abandoned because it was not successful."

Brukner said the artificial ligaments were used in four players from Footscray, but only one — in club legend Doug Hawkins — was successful, while the other three snapped soon after the operation.

Even if the procedure is successful, he maintained that the traditional method, where a replacement ligament is taken from another part of the body and stitched in place of the ACL, was still the better procedure for the sake of longevity.

But, Brukner said, the Swans did not have anything to lose with Malceski because if his new ligament failed, there still would be time for him to have another reconstruction so that he is right to play next season.

In other injury news, the Western Bulldogs' Brian Lake's hip injury has turned out to be worse than previously thought, with the defender having minor surgery yesterday to remove a small amount of cartilage from his right hip.

Bulldogs football manager James Fantasia said he was confident that Lake (formerly Harris) would be fit to play against Adelaide at Telstra Dome in round one of the home-and-away season.