Playing Hurt Part IV: Collingwood icon Darren Millane and his staggering journey to the 1990 flag

He couldn’t mark, he couldn’t tackle and he couldn’t handball with a thumb that broke anew every week for five weeks, but Darren Millane was never going to miss Collingwood’s 1990 premiership.

The Collingwood players would hear the screams.

As the Pies’ post-match showers started flowing in late 1990, so too did the late Darren Millane’s tears.

Because while Collingwood was marching towards a fairytale flag, the club’s revered hard man was living a nightmare.

While some players roll the injury dice for one game at this time of year, Millane did it for five weeks in a staggering display of courage, resilience and toughness.

He had cracked the base of his right thumb at Victoria Park against Fitzroy in the second-last game — Round 21 — of the home-and-away season, suffering a Bennett’s Fracture.

SUBSCRIBE TO THE SACKED PODCAST HERE

With the joint displaced, immediate surgery and an eight-week recovery was considered the only option.

“It was very unstable. It would just slip and slide everywhere,” then-Pies surgeon John Bartlett said.

“I thought, ‘Oh gosh, that’s the end of ‘Pants’. He couldn’t mark, handball or tackle, but from his point of view he was always going to keep playing.

“When Darren said, ‘I’m going to play’, Leigh (coach Leigh Matthews) took me aside and said, ‘What’s going to happen?’ and I said, ‘I think he can bump and we can strap it up so he can catch, but he won’t be able to handball very well and he’ll have great difficulty tackling’, and Leigh replied: ‘He doesn’t tackle anyway’.”

Darren Millane celebrates Collingwood’s 1990 premiership. Picture: Darren Tindale

Millane wrote down his fears at the time, with Sean Millane revealing to the Herald Sun in 2016 that he had found the notes while moving house two decades after his brother’s death.

Millane “nearly went through the roof” when Bartlett strapped his broken right thumb on the Friday before Round 22 and then tried to “put one over” Matthews.

In the coach’s office, he tossed a ball up and down, but just as Millane felt he had convinced his coach, the descending ball hit Millane’s thumb and he dropped it.

“Why don’t we just have a little kick,” Matthews decided.

MORE PLAYING HURT:

Part I: Corey McKernan’s incredible flag story

Part II: Hird lifts lid on finals injuries

Part III: Lion played with cracked ribs, punctured lung

Matthews then fired at least a dozen stab passes at his player.

“I had nowhere to hide,” Millane wrote.

“Each kick I nearly passed out and because the bone had started to knit, it just broke again.”

Millane somehow convinced the selectors, then went home and vomited from the pain.

At Waverley Park, Millane had painkilling injections before the last home-and-away game against North Melbourne, with the first jab so painful he needed water to avoid being sick for the second and third.

Stream every match of the 2019 Toyota AFL Finals Series before the Grand Final Live & On-Demand on KAYO SPORTS. Get your 14 day free trial and start streaming instantly >

Darren Millane (centre) was one of the Magpies’ best on Grand Final day.

Then he broke the thumb again on the way to 30 disposals. In fact, the thumb would break anew early in each game for the next five weeks.

“We would put the fracture back into place, plaster it back up and before every game we would cut that plaster off, inject the area and strap it up as best we could, which kind of half held it in place,” Bartlett said.

“It took about half an hour, that process.”

So raw was the pain by the time the injections had worn off post-game, a teary Millane would avoid contact at all-costs. The running water from the shower was excruciating.

The agony was prolonged by a week because of Collingwood’s qualifying final draw and subsequent replay against West Coast.

But it was symbolic that Millane was the one left to throw the ball aloft after that memorable Grand Final win over Essendon.

He had 28 possessions, the second-most on the ground that day behind teammate Tony Shaw.

“The thing was, he did it for five weeks,” Matthews said.

“A lot of blokes do things in a Grand Final … but he’s playing with a half-operative hand and he was still able to be a very, very valuable player.

MORE NEWS:

Trade news: Would you pay $400k for Heath Shaw?

Ex-Magpie at centre of Toby Greene storm

Giants’ Grundy blunder set to backfire

“He was in a lot of pain after games because the painkillers would wear off. He went through that cycle over and over again.”

To this day, Matthews labelled it as the most courageous thing he had seen in football.

“All of us who played, you might get a stitch without anaesthetic because the doctor sometimes didn’t have any, but your blood was hot,” Matthews said.

“Imagine going to the doctor tomorrow and getting told you’re getting a stitch without anaesthetic. You couldn’t do it could you?

“The fact he knew the pain cycle he was going to keep going through and that he did it for an extended period is unbelievable.

“He was a strong man. He had a great strength of character.”

Originally published as Playing Hurt Part IV: Collingwood icon Darren Millane and his staggering journey to the 1990 flag