Collingwood cop double injury blow after off-season from hell

Collingwood’s off-season has been nightmarish but the pre-season clash has delivered a few more headaches for the embattled club.

Steele Sidebottom and Will Kelly were both in strife.

The big question before the AFL Community Series match between Collingwood and Richmond was which Magpies were we going to get.

While the club still has two weeks before the season stars, it’s been a nightmare pre-season for the club.

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Going back to the trade period last year, after beating West Coast by one point in the first elimination final, the side was dumped from the finals by 68 points to Geelong in week two.

What followed was a debacle of a trade period with Jaidyn Stephenson, Tom Phillips and the especially ugly exit of Adam Treloar.

Then the Do Better report was and continues to be the talk of the AFL world, finding the club had a cultural history of “systemic racism” and Eddie McGuire stepping down as president.

It’s left coach Nathan Buckley under pressure as he revealed he would be prepared to step away from the club at the end of the season “for the betterment of the football club”.

So with the season within reaching distance, the last thing the Magpies need is injuries.

But in the 11.14 (80) to 11.8 (74) pre-season loss to Richmond, two players went down with injuries.

Young 20-year-old prospect Will Kelly copped a boot from the Tigers’ Dylan Grimes on his collarbone and appeared distraught in the rooms after leaving the field in the second term.

Kelly clutched his collarbone after this play.

“He just grabbed it (collarbone) straight away, walked off and that doesn’t look good for the young man. It’s a tough start to his career,” Garry Lyon said in commentary.

It comes after a dislocated elbow cost him more than one game last year.

He was joined by Magpies veteran Steele Sidebottom with a soft tissue injury in a “tight calf”.

Jordan De Goey and Brayden Maynard also appeared to cop knocks but De Goey returned to the field and Maynard finished on the bench with ice on his leg.

Post-game, the Herald Sun’s Jon Ralph said it looked as though Kelly had a broken collarbone and Sidebottom’s injury woes were continuing with the soft tissue damage in the calf.

“Steele Sidebottom is the missing link for this football club, only just nine games with that COVID suspension and staying out of the hub with the birth of his first child,” he said. “But he has what the club is calling a precautionary issue with the calf and they’re also aware he only lasted 15 minutes. He came into this game with a bit of calf soreness and he just wasn’t able to go. So 14 days before a round one clash against the Western Bulldogs at the MCG. He turned 30 two months ago, it’s the time in your career you just can’t be risking those contests.

Sidebottom is just trying to get back on the field regularly.

“The terrible news is for Will Kelly. He seems almost certain to have a cracked collarbone. He got posterised there by Dylan Grimes and he was pretty shattered in the rooms. I think the feeling would be that that would be a broken collarbone. Tom Stewart came back in about a month last year from a cracked collarbone but they tend to be 4-6 week injuries and it just puts him behind the eight-ball. If he had played well tonight, the club had said to him ‘you’re in for round one’. Instead, a player who has only played a single AFL game looks like he’s out for the better part of six weeks.”

In positives for the Magpies, Brody Mihocek and Taylor Adams will return to field in the coming weeks.