AFL 2024: All the latest Crows and Power news as Izak Rankine ruled out
Izak Rankine almost won the game for the Crows on Saturday – but now, in an even bigger blow than that free kick, he won’t be on the field for a while.
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Adelaide star Izak Rankine will miss three-weeks with the hamstring injury he suffered in the dying seconds of the Crows’ close loss to Collingwood.
Rankine hurt his hamstring while bursting forward as Adelaide sought one more chance to win a thriller against the Pies at the MCG on Saturday.
He was controversially called for running too far without bouncing the ball, although it was measured that he ran 24m during the sequence, and the injury compounded another close loss for the Crows.
Adelaide assistant coach Nathan van Berlo said on Monday that Rankine would miss three-weeks with the injury after speaking with the Crows’ high performance manager Darren Burgess.
“Speaking to Darren (Burgess) we believe it’s similar in nature to what he did last year and it will be around about the three-week mark,” van Berlo said.
“He’s (Rankine) been playing some outstanding footy and (it was) arguably the best game I’ve seen him play on the weekend, just his ability to win the footy, hit the scoreboard and he’s been doing that for weeks on end now for us, so it’s going to be a big loss for us in the interim.
“But I guess all we can do is hope that he comes back fresh and ready to go and attack the remainder of the year for us.”
Rankine missed three games with a hamstring injury towards the end of last season, also suffered in the dying stages of a match at the MCG on the same area of the ground.
Before he suffered his latest injury he had 30 disposals, 16 contested possessions, eight clearances and 699 metres gained.
The injury means Rankine will miss out on the Crows’ home Sir Doug Nicholls Round game against West Coast on Sunday.
He designed the guernsey that the Crows, who are going by the name Kuwarna for the two weeks, are wearing across the fortnight of games.
Van Berlo said the Crows would have to put the disappointment of not getting the win over Collingwood behind them.
“We did more than enough to get the result that we should’ve got and upon refection there were a lot of things we could’ve done better to start the game and ultimately finish the game to get the result we wanted and the win we felt we deserved,” he said.
“I know we’ve had enough of these hard learnings and we want to make sure we fix those moving forward.”