Two Good Kids, Two Busted Knees, One Rotten Week

There are weeks in footy — and I’ve lived through enough of them going all the way back to the VFL days — where the football gods just decide to have a proper crack at you, and this past weekend was one of those weeks, the kind that makes you want to put the kettle on, stare at the wall, and wonder what the whole caper is even for.

Within hours of each other, two young men had their seasons ended before a single match had been played, both of them suffering ACL ruptures in pre-season training, both of them at clubs that really, genuinely needed them fit and firing in 2025.

The Archer Heartbreak Hits Different

Let’s start at Arden Street, because even if you bleed navy blue like I bleed royal blue, you’d have to be a hard-hearted type not to feel for young Jackson Archer and the North Melbourne faithful.

The 23-year-old ruptured his right ACL during a training session on Saturday, the Kangaroos confirming the worst through a statement that had all the warmth the club could muster in a genuinely awful moment. The extent of the injury, confirmed by scans, means Archer won’t pull on a boot in anger this season.

Now, for those of you who might be newer to the game — and back in my day you’d know this without being told — Jackson Archer is the son of Glenn Archer, the man North Melbourne named Shinboner of the Century, a half-back flanker so tough and so committed that the word ‘Shinboner’ might as well have been invented for him. Glenn bled for that club in ways that made you wince and admire in equal measure.

So when his boy, following him into the same jumper, following him onto the same ground at Arden Street, suffers yet another serious injury setback in what has already been a horror run with his body, it lands differently. It’s not just footy misfortune — it’s got a weight to it, a narrative cruelty that you really wish the game didn’t deal out to its good people.

The club has said it will continue to support Archer as he works through his rehab program with the medical team, and you’d certainly hope so. The kid deserves every bit of that support.

And Then There’s Our Lot

But I’m a Carlton man, have been since before some of your parents were born, and I’d be fibbing if I pretended the other half of this rotten week didn’t cut me personally.

Our goalsneak — a bloke who was shaping as one of the genuine bright spots in what Carlton desperately needs to be a serious, forward-thinking year — has also been confirmed as a season-ending ACL victim, gone before he’d even had the chance to terrorise opposition backlines in an actual match in 2025.

For a club that’s been building, and building, and building, and sometimes seeming to build the way the Westgate Bridge was built — slowly, expensively, and with more than a few delays — losing a forward-line piece of this type before Round 1 is the kind of thing that makes a man grumpy. And I am already, by nature, a fairly grumpy man.

The Pre-Season Injury Epidemic Nobody Wants to Acknowledge

And here’s where I’m going to say something that I know the suits at headquarters aren’t going to print on a promotional poster: there is something deeply, structurally wrong with how modern pre-seasons are conducted, and watching two ACLs go in one weekend before the competition has even resumed is Exhibit A.

Now, I’m not a physio. I’m not a sports scientist. Back in my day, the extent of sports science was the coach telling you to run around the oval until you were sick and then run some more. I’m not saying that was better — I’m saying that somewhere between then and now, with all the monitoring technology and GPS vests and load-management spreadsheets, we’re still producing shattered knees at an alarming clip in pre-season sessions.

The AFL loves to tinker. Rule changes every other week, new interpretations, a tweak here, a modification there. But the question of why our young men keep blowing their knees in training gets a lot less airtime than whatever the competition committee is planning to do with the interchange next season. Funny, that.

What ACL Means — And Don’t Let Anyone Minimise It

I want to take a moment here, because sometimes in the rush to cover the news and move on to the next thing, we gloss over what an ACL rupture actually represents for a 23-year-old footballer.

It’s not a hamstring. You don’t come back in three weeks. You’re looking at surgery, twelve months minimum of rehabilitation, the kind of grinding, relentless, often lonely daily work that tests a person’s character in ways a grand final never could. And then you come back, and you’ve got to convince yourself — and everyone watching — that you haven’t lost half a step, that the knee is trustworthy, that your body won’t betray you again the moment things get physical.

Some get through that journey magnificently. Others are never quite the same. It is a genuine fork in the road of a football career, and for both Archer and our own man at Carlton, that road just got a whole lot longer and harder.

Both Clubs Need to Get This Right

North Melbourne are on a journey of their own — I don’t mind saying that the Roos have had a tough enough time of it these past few seasons, and the supporters up at Arden Street have shown remarkable patience. Losing Archer, a home-grown player who carries genuine emotional weight for the whole club, is a setback they simply didn’t need.

For Carlton, the calculus is a little different because the expectation level is, appropriately, higher. We’re supposed to be a genuine finals contender. We’ve got the list, we’ve got the coaching staff, we’ve coninued to add pieces in the trade period. A season-ending injury to someone earmarked for a breakout year in front of goal forces Michael Voss and the football department to find answers they weren’t expecting to have to find until much later, if at all.

Whether that’s a recall from the VFL list, a positional shift from elsewhere in the forward line, or simply asking existing players to shoulder more — it’s a problem that needs solving, and it needs solving before Round 1 arrives with all the urgency that first-round footy always brings.

A Long Summer Just Got Longer

The honest truth is that there is nothing anyone can write or say that makes either of these situations feel better in the short term. For Jackson Archer, the road back starts now, and it’s a long one. For our bloke in navy blue — sorry, in royal blue, you’ll have to forgive a man who still sometimes mixes up his colours when he’s worked up — it’s the same story.

Pre-season is supposed to be the hopeful bit. The part where everything is theoretically possible, where the slate is clean, where even the most battle-scarred old Carlton tragic like me allows himself a small, cautious, carefully managed moment of optimism before the competition finds new ways to break your heart.

This week, it found a couple of new ways before we’d even got started. And the only decent response, really, is to wish both young men well, hope the rehab goes smoothly, and save the grumbling — about pre-season structures, about the AFL’s priorities, about all of it — for another day.

Because those blokes have got work to do. And so, eventually, do we.