A Cat Playing on a Broken Bone? Back in My Day That Was Called Mad

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You hear a lot of things out of player press conferences these days that make you sit up in the recliner and nearly spill the cuppa, and this one from the Geelong camp did exactly that. A bloke stands up and tells the footy world he played the best part of a whole season with a bone that never properly healed, effectively broken the entire time, and that without the modern sports science around him he reckons he’d already be retired. Two admissions in one breath, and both of them worth a good hard look.

The Admission That Stopped Me Mid-Sandwich

Now I don’t say this to have a go at the fella, because by all accounts he’s a terrific player and Geelong people would walk over hot coals for him, but you’ve got to admit it’s a fair old thing to cop that a modern AFL footballer can run around for months on end with an un-united fracture and nobody outside the inner sanctum knows a thing about it. Back in my day, and I mean properly back in my day, if you had a break like that you were in plaster and sitting in the outer with a parma and a pot, full stop. There was no quiet managing it through the week, no load monitoring, no clever strapping job that let you trot out onto the park like nothing was the matter. You were injured, you said so, and you missed footy. Simple as that.

But I’ll give credit where it’s due, because the medical stuff around clubs now is genuinely remarkable, and I’m not one of those blokes who reckons everything was better in the old VFL days, even though I do slip and call it that more than I probably should. The sports scientists and the surgeons and the recovery blokes have got players doing things that would’ve been unthinkable a few decades back, and this admission is proof of it either way you look at it. Whether that’s a good thing for the player long-term, well, that’s where my grumbling starts.

Playing Hurt Versus Playing Broken

There’s a difference, and I think it’s one the modern game has quietly blurred over the years. Playing hurt is as old as the game itself, you strap an ankle, you ice a corky, you front up with a shoulder that’s not quite right, and that’s footy, that’s always been footy. But playing on a genuine fracture that hasn’t knitted back together, for the best part of a whole season, that’s a different category entirely, and I reckon plenty of fans would be uneasy about it if they’d known at the time rather than finding out well after the fact in a column like this one.

You’ve got to ask the question of who’s making that call. Is it purely the player’s choice, backed in by doctors who’ve assessed the risk and decided it’s manageable, or is there a subtle pressure that comes from being a star at a club chasing a flag, where every week you’re out there is a week the team’s better for it. I’m not accusing anyone of anything untoward, clubs have duty of care obligations and I’d assume Geelong’s medical staff did their diligence, but it does raise the broader question of how far the competitive instinct pushes blokes past where common sense says they should stop.

The Retirement Admission Is the Bigger Worry

The first bit about the broken bone got the headlines, fair enough, it’s the eye-catching bit. But the second admission, the one where he says he’d be retired by now without the sports science keeping him upright, that’s the one that should make clubs and the AFL sit back and have a think. Because what that tells you, in plain language, is that we’ve built a system clever enough to extend careers that the body itself is telling us should be winding down. That’s a remarkable medical achievement and a genuine worry all at the same time, and I don’t think those two things cancel each other out.