Hit By Injuries, Bombers Search For Fit Bodies
The Sunday Age
Sunday August 17, 2008
ESSENDON will again struggle to field a healthy side in the last two games of the season after losing four players, including David Hille and Dustin Fletcher, to injury yesterday and discovering that Scott Lucas would not play again until 2009.
Hille played out the second half of the Bombers' 56-point loss to Adelaide with a suspected broken hand, while Fletcher received a groin injury. Henry Slattery strained an adductor and the luckless Courtenay Dempsey fractured a leg in only his third minute on the ground.While Mark McVeigh will return after knee surgery against the Western Bulldogs on Friday, and Jason Johnson will likely be promoted for two farewell matches, coach Matthew Knights said he expected to be stretched for numbers and bemoaned the bad luck that had struck such young players as Dempsey, Scott Gumbleton, Heath Hocking and Bachar Houli this season."I'm not too sure how many we'll have," said Knights after the loss, the first time an Essendon side has been beaten by the Crows in Melbourne."On the brighter side, I believe McVeigh will be available and Kyle Reimers will be available and potentially Jarrad Atkinson will also be available. So for the four we think will definitely be going out of the side we may have three coming back and there's probably only another two or three to pick from after that."So we are pretty thin, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel, particularly thinking that Lucas might not come back as well. He looks more likely than not to miss the rest of the year now, so it is getting a little bit thin."Knights said that Lucas, who returned mid-season after surgery on a posterior cruciate ligament, had been feeling some irritation around the knee and also had a sore ankle, but the coach added he would prefer McVeigh to come back into the side rather than writing off his season with only two games remaining.He said Dempsey, who has been injury-stricken since arriving at Essendon and has this year dealt with a bad hamstring tear and a stress fracture in a leg, was unsurprisingly feeling upset about his latest predicament. He broke down while running through the centre square on his own. "He's down. After the game I spoke to him and he's down," Knights said. "We just can't keep our young people on the park this year, it's very frustrating . . . We're just going through a bit of a run and that's part of football."In one aspect we are 12 months behind with them. But if you play a lot when you're 18, 19 or 20, you can potentially play a lot of hard footy early in your career that means there might be some fatigue factor there."That's the positive I'm looking at, that our 19 and 20-year-olds, some of them might not have played a lot of footy but that it might hold them in good stead long term. That's trying to make a positive out of it."Adelaide coach Neil Craig, pleased that his side was able to break its hoodoo and beat the Bombers away from home, said that while the Crows still had an opportunity to push into the top four, his players were simply trying to finish the season as well as they possibly could.But he said it was satisfying for the club that having introduced several new players this season and being perceived to be in some sort of "rebuilding" mode, the club would play off in September once more."It's satisfying for the whole club and I know it's really satisfying, as it should be, for the whole playing group because in the end the players deliver the product, it's not the management or the coach," said Craig, who last week had his contract extended until the end of 2011."Now we get an opportunity to play at a higher level with the finals to come, that's when the best play the best and it's another level of competition so we'll find out a lot more about our squad."
© 2008 The Sunday Age