Patrick Dangerfield has only missed four games across 10 seasons through injury and is expecting to be rather restless as he recovers from surgery to his ankle earlier in the week.
“It sucks to be frank, but it is the game. I have been incredibly blessed with the run of luck I’ve had when it comes to injuries,” Dangerfield said speaking to Gerard Whateley on SEN Mornings.
“Sometimes that dial changes and you just need to focus on what you can control, be diligent with your recovery and those sorts of things and then hopefully get back and join in on the way the guys are playing at the moment.”
Next week Dangerfield is set to reach an initial marker which will assist he and the medical team to help determine how the surgery went and a more accurate prediction one a return date.
“It is probably next week just judging on how much swelling there is. Making sure that all the wounds from the surgery have healed and then the next key component is getting range back in,” he said.
“We do a knee to wall test, so basically foot flat on the ground and you try to get your knee as close to the wall, and at the moment that range is pretty limited as you could expect so that’s the first one - getting full range back in the ankle.”
“Then once you do that start to build off body weight movement, Alter-G which is basically a treadmill that has the ability to take away your body weight, so you can adjust it to 50% of your own body weight, you can adjust it even further, so that’s now something that all football clubs now have and really does aid recovering athletes that have hurt lower limbs.”
Dangerfield enjoyed watching the Cats return to form against an undermanned West Coast last week.
“It was an enjoyable second quarter and it felt like it started to click for us.”
“Confidence is a funny thing in the game. I felt like we played okay the week before, we just couldn’t execute our goals and a lot of the time that can come off the back of being frustrated.
“It was just nice to see some reward for effort and you can see the dial starting to turn.
“It’s a very even competition, but that confidence pill can make a huge difference to teams and we feel like we are playing the right way and just getting a bit more reward for it now.”
Geelong will travel to the SCG on Saturday night to play Sydney from 7.25pm.
