How GWS finally got Brett Deledio on the park after ‘longest calf injury in history’
THE Giants consulted sporting leagues around the world to solve the “complicated saga” that was Brett Deledio’s calf, and after six months they finally have their boom recruit on the park.
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DAVID Joyce has worked in the English Premier League, rugby union in two countries and been to two Olympic Games with Great Britain and China.
Then he encountered Brett Deledio’s calves.
If Deledio, 30, has been stuck on a six-month injury rollercoaster that’s pushed him to the brink, Greater Western Sydney head of athletic performance Joyce and his fitness team have been sitting in the car behind him.
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“I’ve been doing this for 19 years and I’ve never thought more about an injury than I have about Brett Deledio’s calf,” Joyce said this week.
“It has been an extraordinarily trying and complicated saga. We’ve spoken to a lot of people all around the world about this calf. We’ve consulted Olympic teams in Australia, Great Britain, New Zealand and the US; we’ve contacted people in the Premier League, NFL and the AIS, because this has been one out of the book.
“Calf injuries, or any sort of muscle injury, generally obey the same rules. They’re sore and tight, then you get strength and flexibility into them, you start running straight lines and it’s a fairly predictable time line. It’s why you guys know a hamstring is a three-game injury.
“No calf in history has ever taken six months.”
Deledio’s has.
The classy matchwinner at Richmond who was the Giants’ boom recruit last off-season finally will make his debut in orange when GWS hosts Melbourne in Canberra on Saturday.
It will be his first game since July 16, 2016, when a separate calf problem ended his season early.
The complexity and seemingly never-ending nature of his run of setbacks in Sydney will ensure everyone from the Giants’ chairman to the boot studder will allow themselves a little smile this afternoon.
For so long, the words “calf” and “indefinite” appeared next to “Deledio” more often than his first name.
He has used more exercise machines than a model on The Shopping Channel in a bid to get right. Sandpits, swimming pools and dry needling have also played a part.
For a man accustomed to the good in football — No.1 draft pick in 2004, 243 games in 12 relatively injury-free seasons, dual All-Australian and dual Richmond best-and-fairest — here was a man understandably rocked by his run of misfortune.
“It certainly has been a challenge and I’ve had some dark days,” Deledio said this week.
“But I’ve got an incredibly supportive family and a good bunch of friends, and I’ve leant on them quite a bit. I’ve always looked at it like, ‘What other options have I got?’ and we’re a great chance to go a long way this year, so I wanted to give myself every shot to be a part of that.
“There was always that motivation, so I never wanted to give up.”
To fully comprehend Deledio’s soft tissue ordeal, we have to go back to November.
Eager to make a good impression after the Giants had traded future first and third-round draft picks and given him a three-year deal, Deledio reported for training a week early.
He was healthy despite his problems in the second half of 2016 and, in an admirable show of goodwill, the Tigers were willing to help GWS keep him that way.
“We spoke to Richmond. We wanted to know what they had been doing and if they had their time over whether they’d change anything,” Joyce said.
“He’s a legend at Richmond and he left there on really good terms and people in my position really wanted to see him succeed because they care about the guy.
“I just think sharing that information is about being decent human beings and it’s what we should all be doing.”
All had gone well for close to two months before the first hurdle arrived — tightness in the right calf during training in mid-January.
Deledio was back up and running again quickly, then hit what Joyce called a “plateau”. The nightmare was just beginning.
A precautionary scan revealed a nasty surprise — tendon damage.
“So we went, ‘Right, we’re going to scale this right back’,” Joyce recalled.
“He had a couple of successive instances where we’d get him up to a really good straight-line running base and each time we started to change direction he would tighten up and the areas of tightness would change.
“He’d go from lateral to medial and it’s like getting an electric shock when you’re not expecting it.
“If you got told you’ve got one four-month injury, you’d grieve for the first day and get your head around it, but Brett had all these little ones. He’d feel really good and he’d get another electric shock.”
But the hammer blow didn’t come until June. Deledio had made enough progress to take part in his first training session with teammates since January. He felt terrific and was moving well, but in the last 40m of a 5km session he felt tightness in his “good” left calf.
“There was an element of, ‘How can this happen?’ but another part of us was saying, ‘At least it’s not the other one’,” Joyce said.
There was no silver lining for Deledio, however, who considered chucking the season in the bin.
“Thoughts definitely did go through my head that maybe I’d be better off just cooling the heels for the rest of the year and getting it right,” Deledio said.
Joyce said: “He was beyond exasperated. We just ended up saying, ‘We’ve got to go again’. That’s the way it is.”
Deledio did, surrounded by a Giants’ rehab team that included Mike Lancaster, Luke Heath and Mick Byers, while good mate and football manager Wayne Campbell was the emotional support.
“If the club has done anything for him other than the obvious, it was to not put pressure on him, whether that message came from (chairman) Tony Shepherd or (chief executive) David Matthews to me to say the outcome will be the outcome and it’s a longer-term look,” Campbell said.
“While it didn’t look good for short periods, that allowed us to not rush things.”
Lancaster had arrived at the club from England in February and, with little concept of the game or its high-profile athletes, approached Deledio with fresh eyes, which proved critical.
“Wherever I’ve been in the past you do feel that pressure to find an answer,” Lancaster said.
“But I was given the space to suggest this is what I’d like to do because they’d tried virtually everything by that point. We focused more away from the calves and looked at pelvic controls and glute stability.
“For me, because he was having issues on both sides ... we needed to address his movement control and there were parts of back control we needed to iron out a bit more.
“I very much had to lean on the other boys as we got to the back-end to make sure we programmed it correctly for an AFL athlete.
“It’s been a testament to how this club exhausts every option. They have lived it.”
Deledio made his long-awaited comeback in the NEAFL two weeks ago, playing the second half in a win over Sydney University that had most at the Giants on edge.
“We were in Melbourne so I wasn’t there, but I was following it on the app,” Joyce said.
“I was just watching the updates of how many possessions he had. When he’s got 12 touches and it’s updated a couple of times and he still has 12 touches, you think, ‘Please still be playing’. But then it updates to 14 and you’re like, ‘Oh, beauty’.”
Deledio backed that up with a more complete 25-disposal performance against Gold Coast last week and the green light was given for a GWS senior game more than half a year in the making.
No one at the Giants wants to tempt fate by declaring Deledio out of the woods completely, but there’s a well-earned excitement starting to show through.
“Shaun Burgoyne missed the first seven games of his first season at Hawthorn and has barely missed one since,” Joyce said.
“We’re hopeful Brett is going to be the same for us.”
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