AFLW Round 2: All the teams and tips; inside Angela Foley’s recovery from ACL heartache
From tearing her ACL in the 2021 Grand Final to a new game-day role: Crows’ star defender Angela Foley talks about her own recovery and how she felt watching others go down in Round 1.
Crows’ two-time premiership winning defender Angela Foley was watching on television when Collingwood champion Bri Davey fell to Ikon Park’s grass on Sunday clutching her knee during the Pies’ Round 1 clash with Carlton.
For Foley, it was shattering to watch, knowing that only eight months earlier she had done the same: except the grass was Adelaide Oval, the opponent was Brisbane and the game was her side’s losing 2021 AFLW Grand Final.
The 40-game foundation player — who’d stepped in as captain after Chelsea Randall was ruled out with concussion — had torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee.
Fast forward to Round 1, 2022, and three female footy stars — Western Bulldogs’ Isabel Huntington, Pies’ Davey and Brisbane’s Kate Lutkins — have all suffered the same injury.
“It’s really sad, honestly, and Round 1, it’s cruel and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” Foley, 33, says.
“This game that we play, it brings you so much joy, every day. You rock up to training, we have so much fun. But it can also be pretty cruel at times.
“So for all the joy that you get sometimes there’s got to be heartbreak as well. You experience that when you lose, and you also experience it when you get injured, unfortunately.”
Round 1’s injuries have again brought the incidence of wreaked knees in the AFLW into the spotlight.
Last month, the AFL released its fifth annual AFLW Injury Report, encompassing the 2021 season.
The report showed that last season had the lowest number of ACL injuries since the league’s inception in 2017.
“The incidence of ACL injuries causing at least one match to be missed was 3.22 injuries per 1000 player hours in the 2021 AFLW season, compared to 8.83 in 2020 and 5.14 in 2019,” the report observed.
But despite the lower incidence, there were still devastating examples of the injury, most notably to Melbourne’s Shae Sloane — sister of Crows AFL captain Rory — who tore her ACL for the third time. She has since retired.
Others struck down included Geelong midfield star Olivia Purcell, Bulldogs’ Deanna Berry and Collingwood’s Jordan Membrey.
Foley didn’t expect her name to be added to that list.
“I’ve never had an injury before; I’ve never rolled my ankle, I’ve never broken a bone, I’ve never missed a game because I was injured, my whole life,” she muses.
“So this was the first time I had to deal with being injured and then all the scans and all the rehab and the physio.”
Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise: she wasn’t aware of the steep hill she’d be forced to climb en route back to full fitness.
That journey required a mammoth juggle of the rehab with her work as a sports educator at Seymour College.
It meant she worked from her hospital bed after her knee reconstruction, and then would wake at 5am to fit in rehab before school started.
“You wake up the next day and life is still going on; you’re still a teacher and you’ve still got students and the bell still rings,” Foley says.
The 5am starts soon became routine, but not always easy.
“I’d get up that early because I’ve got to be at work by 7am, and one morning I walked out of the gym and I wasn’t sweating — I had not worked up a sweat — and I just burst into tears and said to my partner: ‘What is the point of this?’.”
But as the months wore on, soon she was walking unaided. Then running. And soon enough, AFLW pre-season rolled around and she was back around her footy family.
Foley, who’s now close to full contact training, will spend the 2022 season on Adelaide’s inactive list and take on a game-day role feeding messages from the line coaches in the box to senior coach Matthew Clarke on the bench.
Her new role started triumphantly last Sunday with a thumping 30-point win over reigning premiers the Lions.
“The good thing is that I know I can’t play and I’ve dealt with that in my head, but now it’s about what I can learn from just watching, how can I get better as a player, this season by watching the games. I’m really exciting about that.”
And her hope is that’s she’ll be back next season, better for the experience.
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