Collingwood star Jamie Elliott feared he’d never play AFL again after serious back injury

COLLINGWOOD star Jamie Elliott opens up about the moment his back injury started, the moment it returned, the fear he would never play again and the painful struggle he has endured to return.

JAMIE Elliott can’t move.

It’s Round 15, 2015, and Collingwood is trailing Port Adelaide by seven points at half time. Yet in the bowels of Adelaide Oval, the Magpies’ mercurial high-flyer is anything but.

Elliott has kicked 27 goals from a highlight-laden first 13 games, but suddenly, putting one foot in front of the other is almost impossible.

“I can remember being inside at halftime and I could barely move,” Elliott said.

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“Running up the race for the third quarter, it was really tough to get going. Once I did it was fine, but after the game when I cooled off I was in a lot of pain.”

It’s a night Elliott remembers vividly. It was the first time he felt the affects of a pars defect in his lower back and the start of a 21-month battle with an injury he thought would finish his football career.

Elliott didn’t play a single game in 2016. In that time strangers would approach him to bluntly declare he would never play again. There was doubt, anxiety, frustration and ultimately, major surgery.

Jamie Elliott has revealed the pain and struggles he has endured in getting fit and back playing after a serious back injury. Picture: Wayne Ludbey

Somehow Elliott won the battle, but he hasn’t won the war against a complex injury that has changed the way he goes about his daily life. The way he sits and how often he does, the way he trains and the need to lie on the couch at home.

We have met Elliott in the Glasshouse Eatery overlooking Olympic Park and taken a seat — a simple act most people barely think about.

Not Elliott.

“I think about my posture every day. Even now I don’t feel comfortable sitting like this for a long period,” Elliott said. “My body needs to move.”

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To put the seriousness of Elliott’s injury into perspective, even for a 24-year-old in the prime of his athletic life, there are good days and bad days. That may always be the case.

“Even today for example, I didn’t feel great before training,” Elliott said.

“It can be like my whole body feels disconnected. My core, all the way around my waist to my back, it just doesn’t feel clean. That’s how I describe it.

“So what I do is activation work, movement, just to get it going. If I’m not moving freely up in my upper back it’s going to refer straight into my lower back and I’ve got a bad disc above the surgery where it is.

Jamie Elliott was restricted to walking laps at training for a long period and didn’t play a game in 2016. Picture: Hamish Blair

“Previously, when I was having a bad day it would really play on my mind ... but now I feel confident that as long as I prepare well, do my movement, I’ll be fine.”

In layman’s terms, pars defect is bone stress and a common cause of lower back pain in young athletes. So common, Elliott believes most players would have “some sort of fracture” in their back that otherwise lays dormant. If it doesn’t, most people recover with rest.

He wasn’t so lucky.

After that scary night in Adelaide back in 2015, Elliott took two weeks off, toughed out the rest of a season and ended as Collingwood’s leading goalkicker.

But the off-season rest counted for naught.

“I came back in the pre-season and had a set shot at the Olympic Boulevard end and I felt something sharp in my lower right back,” he said.

“I remember saying to the physio, ‘It doesn’t feel right, watch me kick again’. I got the same pain and just said: ‘Nah, that’s it’. We got it scanned and it showed bone stress so we cooled off again over the New Year period.”

Jamie Elliott finally made the return he had been dreaming of against St Kilda. Picture: Getty

When Elliott resumed, the Pies were on a training camp in Queensland. He was running well, but when the balls came back out, so too did the pain.

“We got another scan and this time it showed a crack,” he said.

“But it had got to the point where I was so sick of the setbacks and not getting anywhere that I wanted to train despite the discomfort. I did a long kick and felt three cracks down my right side and I felt it break through. It fully broke through. I was like, ‘OK, I’ve got to get off’. I came in and laid down and I could barely move.

“I wasn’t really sleeping at this point and was on a lot of pain killers.”

Elliott had spent a lot of time confiding in captain Scott Pendlebury and coach Nathan Buckley. Cricket Australia physio Alex Kountouris was also consulted given his work with back stress fracture victims and Australian fast bowlers James Pattinson, Josh Hazlewood and Peter Siddle.

All agreed surgery was a last resort, but Elliott had run out of options. He went under the knife of orthopedic spine surgeon, John Cunningham, last May and two screws were inserted.

Jamie Elliott is starting to regain the form he showed in early 2015. Picture: Michael Klein

“It didn’t really dawn on me until I was lying in bed before I went in for surgery. I was thinking, ‘I’m having back surgery here, it’s pretty serious’,” Elliott said.

“I woke up and I was in so much pain. I struggled to move for about a month, I couldn’t sleep, I was lying on my back with pillows under my knees and there was a lot of nausea. It was tough.

“One of the screws was also running along a nerve and hitting it and it was very painful whenever I walked. I’d get a sharp stabbing pain when I lifted my right leg and that went on for two weeks, which played on my mind.”

If the physical pain was excruciating, the mental anguish wasn’t far behind.

“It’s funny, I was getting a lot of people saying, ‘You’re not going to recover, you’ll never play again’ and all that sort of stuff,” he said.

“This was just people approaching me in general public; people who had back surgery in the past. I’d meet people, even in club functions, and that played on my mind a bit.

“I had a lot of dreams about playing footy again. I’d wake up and it would really depress me because I’d be jolted back into reality. There were definitely times when I thought I wasn’t going to get back.”

Jamie Elliott is a very important player for Collingwood and one of the most exciting forwards in the competition. Picture: Michael Klein

Unfortunately, adversity and setbacks are nothing new for Elliott.

His back problems are constantly put into perspective by a childhood touched by tragedy. Elliott was 13 when he lost his father, Gary, to cancer. Three years later, older brother Matthew suffered brain damage from a car crash.

“I’m still maturing as a person and learning to deal with anything that comes up,” he said.

“With my back I went into my shell a bit. I was angry and depressed most days. But possibly having those past events in my life sped me along to come out of my shell.”

Three consecutive games into the comeback he dreamt about, Elliott’s form is quickening too.

“I’m at the point now where I’ve just found little ways that help me,” he said.

“Every day I think about things that could make my back worse or better. It is mentally taxing, but if I want to play at the elite level it’s something I have to do.”

Originally published as Collingwood star Jamie Elliott feared he’d never play AFL again after serious back injury