Dylan Grimes opens up on his hamstring issues and details how the Tigers have recovered from 2016
DYLAN Grimes has been to hell and back with his body. But now the star Tiger is in career best form and able to enjoy Richmond’s charge up the ladder.
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DYLAN Grimes has repeatedly laid himself bare in his seven years at the famously combustible Richmond Football Club.
There was the email to Tigers official Wayne Campbell before his second hamstring tendon surgery, wondering if he could endure six months of recovery again.
And the trip to Germany for specialist hamstring treatment where he emerged sore but hopeful after 200 injections into his lower back in a number of days.
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He has been to hell and back enough times to know false dawns and genuine breakthroughs on the road to something greater.
So much so that the events of November and December at his football club still bring a smile to his face.
There he witnessed a series of discoveries as Richmond stripped back its culture, its leadership and its game plan and had a good look at what lay inside.
It has been the catalyst for a transformation that is deeper than the 5-2 start to the 2017 season.
Richmond is 12 months on from the 1-6 start to the season that threatened Damien Hardwick’s tenure and looked to have undermined so much of the growth at Punt Road.
According to Grimes, injury-free and combining with Alex Rance and David Asbury the best trio of tall defenders in the comp right now, it started right at the top.
HONEST COTCH
CAPTAIN Trent Cotchin’s concession he was not the square-jawed perfectionist he portrayed was the catalyst for a summer of growth.
“It was the really early days of the pre-season and he said in the past I have struggled to be too perfect,” Grimes told the Sunday Herald Sun this week.
“He said, ‘Footy is not perfect and life isn’t perfect. I am not the perfect leader but what I do care so much about is the group and I care so much about the individual’.
“When he said that, it was almost the elephant in the room.’ You look at Cotchy, off-field he is this perfect human being and players that saw weaknesses in themselves might have struggled to relate to that.
“But having him say he wasn’t perfect and this is what I am struggling with and put it on the table, it changed the whole pre-season dynamic straight away.
“We went from being nervous about the pre-season and what it was going to bring. One of Cotchy’s big things is being vulnerable and accepting your weaknesses.
“It has changed the group immensely. It made them think I am here because of what I bring to the table, not what I don’t bring to that table.”
GAME PLAN (FUN INJECTION)
THE next revelation was the shift in Richmond’s game plan, one that kept the fundamentals but allowed players to play to their strengths.
Hardwick spent those early weeks reinforcing the years of growth while encouraging players to back themselves in.
“In some ways they have released the shackles, in some ways they haven’t changed much,’’ Grimes says.
“When we first came into the pre-season Dimma focused on reaffirming with us that we are great players and are a finals team regardless of last year’s performance.
“He showed us examples of other teams that had fallen short one year and gone on to win the premiership as well.
“But the focus was on players bringing their own game. It is so much more relaxing and there was a freedom around the place.
“For the first time ever we are seeing players from the draft come out of their shells straight away.”
The beauty of the game plan is that Richmond has retained the hardness at the contest while injecting genuine speed and quicker ball movement off half back.
Add in a backline that boasts Rance and Astbury as the AFL’s best two players this year at winning back opposition possessions, and the combination is clicking.
“The game plan has injected a lot of fun. We are encouraged to play to our strengths, bring our own flair and individual skills to the game plan,’’ says Grimes.
“So it means guys are getting to the most out of themselves and playing the footy they have played their whole lives, not just trying to fit the mould of what a perfect AFL player should look like.
“They are playing off instinct, so guys like Dusty (Martin) and Dan Butler and Jason Castagna, they are playing great footy and it can be unpredictable at times but it’s a good spectacle.”
HARMONY
THE final building block was harmony.
Alex Rance recently said he had taken years to come to grips with Jack Riewoldt’s emotional approach to football, misjudging his approach to leadership.
Grimes says that public concession was first made behind Richmond’s closed doors.
“There has never been a closer bond between those two as now,’’ Grimes says.
“They are on a par with what they bring to the group — the jovial side, their passion for the group, the love they share for the club.
“All they do is care. But Rancy was completely honest with the group about where he was at with his footy and did much the same as Cotch did.
“Once you realise players like Alex and Jack take accountability for what they are trying to work on, the rest of the group can get behind them.”
FREMANTLE
ON SUNDAY at the MCG Grimes will take to the field and likely tackle a dangerous foe like Fremantle’s Michael Walters.
You probably won’t notice him unless Walters lights up or his own hamstring goes pop, but more than likely he will get his job done again for Hardwick.
Just as he did two weeks ago when Adelaide lit up Richmond with 35 scoring shots, but Grimes contained Eddie Betts to a single goal.
He is reticent to agree he is playing career-best football.
But finally at 25 he getting on top of a body that has failed him more than most.
He estimates he has done seven or eight hamstrings, and at one stage was the only AFL player to have both hamstrings surgically repaired.
How does it actually feel as the sniper gets you once again?
“It sounds funny, but it literally feels like tearing muscle, tearing flesh,’’ he says.
“In some ways its like when you get a really good hit on your funny bone and there is this tingling. There is that shock of pain that hits you and then there is the aftermath with all the bleeding and recovery that goes with it.
“There are different grades and more severe ones, but instantly you know what has happened,’’ he says.
“You know it’s five-weeks plus sidelined and there are times when you just throw your hands up in the air, you feel like there is absolutely nothing more you can do.
“You start to build a bit of self-doubt after a while, after your fourth or fifth hamstring you think, “Am I ever going to be fit for this game? Am I ever going to be an AFL player?”
HAMMY TIME
IN mid-2012 with Grimes’ career at the crossroads, he was sent to German doctor Hans-Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt for expert treatment.
The series of injections included actovegin, an extract of calf’s blood, and anti-inflammatory traumeel.
The week before Usain Bolt had been a patient, with rock star Bono also dropping in for treatment.
“Over a five-day period they put a couple of hundred injections into my lower back. I came out feeling really sore but at the same time it sped up my recovery process by a number of weeks,” he says.
Yet several months later when his hamstring failed him again badly enough to need surgery with Melbourne’s Julian Feller, he had finally hit rock bottom.
“Not many people know this but I sent Wayne Campbell an email when I found out I was getting surgery again,’’ he said.
“I almost broke down and I said to him in the email I was one hamstring away from giving up footy and that I wasn’t sure how I would get through the next six months of rehab.
“I told him how much I was doubting myself. Wayne walked up to me the next day and put his arm around me and said I promise you everything will be OK.
“He was right and I have never had a serious hamstring injury again.”
He will always miss games with soreness and niggles but after at one stage averaging only eight games a year solely through hamstring issues he has become a more durable player.
He didn’t need a reminder of the brutal nature of football but got one anyway when brother Jack was delisted by Melbourne this summer.
Yet as Dylan says, his brother had readied himself for life after football, immediately moving into a personal training business he had already established.
For Dylan Grimes that release is his farm in Macedon Ranges.
He and his partner of five years, Elisha, purchased a hobby farm six months ago where she hosts weddings and he “totters around managing the cattle and not much else”.
Those eight black angus cattle allow him a release, spending free days in his own world far removed from the pressures of Punt Road.
“It’s great for work-life balance. It means I can get away from footy when things are up or down or whenever I am injury wise, just leave the city and feel like you are in the middle of nowhere.
“You get to enjoy life without the pressures of footy, spending all day in the paddock and not realise the whole day has gone.”
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