The inside story of Demons recruit Harley Bennell’s AFL comeback
After tearing his calf 25 times, injury-riddled star Harley Bennell met a physiotherapist late last season. And a rare medical discovery helped save a career that appeared over. See the inside story behind his comeback.
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It was the rare medical discovery which helped save Harley Bennell.
The midfield speedster had torn his calf 25 times and had not run pain-free in five years when Bennell first met Geelong West physiotherapist Peter Stanton late last season.
Bennell, 27, had been cut by Fremantle after only two games in four years, and widely written off.
But in a last roll of the dice, the No. 2 draft pick told Stanton something funny happened the last time he pinged his calf for playing for Peel Thunder in the WAFL.
“Harley said he stepped back and when he took off it (calf) just went ‘bang’,” Stanton told the Herald Sun.
“But what was really interesting was that at the same time his heel went completely numb and he had all these pins and needles.
“Now that is really unusual for a straight calf tear, because there is normally just pain in your calf, but often Harley said he felt neural, or ‘nervy’ pain when he did it.”
So 61-year-old Stanton poured through Bennell’s long medical history on the lookout for something else. A fresh breakthrough.
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Fremantle had already checked out Bennell’s back, sent him off to Germany for exhaustive examination and tried to manage all of his scar tissue, all without luck.
But something jumped off the page at Stanton which he had not seen before in four decades of physiotherapy.
In a report from Perth radiologist Eamon Koh, it was noted that Bennell had an extra muscle growing almost horizontally across the back of his knees, about 4-5cm long.
Stanton thought the tissue could be pressing on some nerves and or blood vessels and potentially causing the pain and irritation.
Brisbane orthopaedic surgeon Ben Forster joined the investigation and agreed it was a good idea to remove the “accessory slip of the lateral gastrocnemius”.
“Eamon reported really in a kind of offhand manner during one of his calf tears that he had this extra bit of muscle at the back of his knee,” Stanton said.
“It’s not something that many people have and it’s not something you really look for because if someone has hurt their calf, you look at the calf. You don’t normally go looking up near the back of the knee.”
The moment Harley had been waiting for. 🌟#GoDees pic.twitter.com/w8b6VXe6N3
— Melbourne Demons (@melbournefc) June 10, 2020
Stanton was adamant there were no guarantees the surgery to remove the muscle would fix Bennell, as there remains considerable scarring on the belly of the calf muscle which the linebreaker will have to manage for the rest of his career.
Regardless, the West Australian jumped at the chance to go under the knife, desperately hoping it would reignite his stalled 83-game career.
And incredibly, almost immediately after Bennell got out of hospital, he felt relief.
The new Demon could finally train and run pain-free, for the first time in a very long time, paving way for his first game in 1021 days against Carlton at Marvel Stadium tomorrow.
“Harley told me that ‘For the past five years, every time I ran I had pain in my calf’,” Stanton said.
“He’d say ‘My calves would be sore the whole time’.
“So, while they wouldn’t tear every time, he always felt them.
“Now he says when I run around, I don’t feel them.”
Melbourne was desperate for someone of Bennell’s class to complement its hard nut engine room.
And when football manager Josh Mahoney and coach Simon Goodwin told Bennell the news they would offer him a contract early in the new year, the young father broke down and cried.
There were hugs all around on Wednesday when teammate Steven May and Goodwin broke the selection news at team training.
Even better for the Demons, he is a free hit. A man once considered one of the most damaging wingmen in the game before the calf trouble cost nothing in terms of a trade and less than $80,000 in minimum wages.
Stanton said he spoke to two other clubs – Sydney and Geelong – about Bennell’s condition, but was unable to convince them he was worth the punt, leaving the Demons with a potential massive bargain.
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And new high performance manager Darren Burgess has seemingly worked wonders overseeing Bennell’s rehabilitation program, despite a small setback in March.
“I chatted to Sydney and chatted to Geelong and I can understand them not being able to form a big positive opinion and say ‘Yeah that will work, we will take him’,” Stanton said.
“He had had 25 calf tears and we then went through something (surgery) which wasn’t really in the literature.
“So you can’t really look at it and say ‘Yeah, that works’ because we haven’t really seen it.
“But he was never prepared to give up. He was cheesed off that he kept having the injury problem, but his attitude was fantastic.
“I’ve become reasonably attached to him and getting to know him he really seems like a decent bloke who has done a great job of turning things around when lots of people would have given up.”
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Originally published as The inside story of Demons recruit Harley Bennell’s AFL comeback