Lachie Neale reveals his Grand Final injury ‘snap’, Lions skipper avoids post-season surgery
Lachie Neale said ‘something snapped’ in his troublesome foot during Brisbane’s Grand Final win. Now, the Lions have revealed whether the blow will hamper their skipper’s pre-season.
Brisbane Lions superstar Lachie Neale will not require surgery and is expected to return to full training by the New Year.
Scans taken on Tuesday confirmed Neale had torn the plantar fascia in his left foot but the dual-Brownlow Medallist had avoided needing to go under the knife.
Instead, the 31 year old will spend 4-6 weeks in a moonboot before slowly working his way back to a full training load which the club expects to be sometime after Christmas.
Neale had previously revealed he felt a “pop” in his foot during the grand final win over Sydney last Saturday and anticipated he had “snapped” his plantar fascia.
“So obviously he’s made a few comments about a tear or a pop under his foot … he’s torn his plantar fascia,” high performance manager Damien Austin told this masthead on Wednesday.
“We don’t have to worry about an operation. We’ve spoken with surgeons and so forth and they’re happy with where it’s at.
“Lachie will have an extensive period of time in a boot, non-weight bearing, to let it recover and then by the time we get back to pre-season he’ll be back running.
“We should aim for full training by post-Christmas.”
It is a great result for the Lions and Neale, who had carefully managed his plantar fasciitis for more than two months throughout the back-end of the regular season and throughout the finals campaign.
It means Neale will spend the majority of his off-season in recovery mode, but it is a small price to pay for finally earning that elusive premiership.
“There’s a bit of damage there so it’s going to take some time to heal,” Austin said.
“Obviously a few days of drinking and being on his feet all day hasn’t helped at all. But we have time now. We can put him in a boot, we don’t have to run him for a while.
“(The team) will be back in eight weeks in front of us and by Christmas we expect him to be in full training.”
Neale revealed he asked the medical team not to share with him the severity of the injury, choosing instead to just play through the pain.
But behind the scenes it became an extensive operation to get the star midfielder ready to play each weekend.
“We did have scans on it so we knew what it was early on and we had to make an educated decision from there,” Austin said.
“He basically had plantar fasciitis, which gives you quite bad pain under the heel, so we obviously had to adjust his training week. But it was also about whether he could manage the pain, could he deal with the pain and what could we do to decrease the pain so he could get through training and playing.”
Austin revealed there were even meetings with surgeons – which Neale took part in – to inform the best course of action as the season wound down.
But ultimately, it came down to Neale’s ability to deal with the pain and the extensive week-to-week rehabilitation that included a moonboot, multiple pool and physio sessions and painkillers.
“Credit to Lachie, he’s done an amazing job. There’s definitely people and players who probably wouldn’t have done what he’s done, but his mental toughness and resilience to deal with the pain was incredible,” Austin said.
“The issue we had was, like most injuries, they don’t just heal in seven days. So we were pushing the extremes every week, trying to get him to run 12km, jump, land, tackle … pushing what we could do in recovery in a short period of time, knowing he would be sore again.
“Lachie’s week (for months) was pretty much managing the pain. He had the mentality of, ‘I’m going to accept it, deal with it, and by the end of the week I’ll be training and playing and then move on’. His acceptance of it and his attitude towards it to just play was phenomenal and has been for a long time.”
NEALE’S INJURY PAIN DULLED BY ULTIMATE REWARD
— Scott Gullan
It was the moment Lachie Neale knew was coming but had been desperately praying it didn’t arrive before Saturday.
For the past 10 weeks he’d required painkilling injections in his heel just to get out on the ground and the injury had gradually got worse and worse as the Lions launched their unlikely premiership tilt in September.
But Neale knew it was a ticking time bomb when he ran out onto the MCG for the Grand Final. He just hoped it would hold on long enough for him to have an impact and get the premiership medallion he’d been searching all his career for.
Funnily enough when the foot “snapped” the Brisbane co-captain smiled. As he hobbled off to the bench to tell the Lions medical staff who had been saying their own prayers about it for months, his team was 10 goals up.
“In that last quarter something snapped in my foot,” Neale said. “I was really hobbling around in the last quarter and Fages said, ‘Are you sure you want to go back on?’.
“I was like bloody oath, I need to finish this game.”
Up until that point Neale hadn’t allowed himself to concede the Lions were going to win their fourth ever premiership despite being in a commanding position from halftime onwards thanks to a seven-goal second quarter.
“At halftime I was very happy with the position we were in (46-point lead) but we’d been in that before at the Opening Round against Carlton and they rolled us.
“It probably wasn’t until I came off for my spell in the last quarter and saw that there was about seven minutes left I thought, ‘They can’t catch us now’. That was a good feeling.”
While pumped about his timing on holding his foot together until the last quarter on GF day, Neale, 31, also said his timing about winning a flag when he arrived in Brisbane from Fremantle in 2019 had also been on the money.
After 135 games with the Dockers, the gun midfielder shocked the football world when he requested a trade to the Lions who’d just finished 15th in 2018.
“This is really rewarding for me,” he said. “Coming here after the team had won five games the year before, I thought it would take about this long for us to reach this point.
“I know we still jumped up the ladder and competed in finals straight away (from 2019) which was a bit unexpected but I thought we’d be ready for this now.
“I’m just so proud and happy to be a small part of a massive cog.
“The journey that the club has been on, every scenario, finals and home and away, that we could be in we have been in. Nothing was a surprise to us, the ability of the group to find a way, not to panic in those moments when things are getting tough, it’s a credit to us.
“This is an incredibly resilient group, no-one, I don’t even think Fages thought we’d be here halfway through the year.
“Even in the second week of finals we were down and out against GWS but we found a way to come back and win that game. I think that was the turning point that gave us belief.
“I think GWS and Sydney were sort of on par as the teams to beat as well as us as I always had belief in our group.
“To come back and win that one against a very good side, I think that sort of propelled us to now.”
The two-time Brownlow Medallist came close to adding the Norm Smith Medal to his trophy cabinet with his stunning 34-possession (18 contested), nine clearance game seeing him come second in the voting to his 20-year-old teammate Will Ashcroft.
“He’s a superstar and he will take the crown from me as the No. 1 mid next year, 100 per cent,” Neale said.
“To do that off a limited prep with an ACL, who knows what he can do next year? The sky’s the limit for him.”
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