JACKSON Trengove was in hospital last July, waiting for an operation to fix the damaged nerve in his injured right leg. Before he was wheeled in, he
met with a nerve specialist, who presented him with two quite different scenarios.

If the surgery takes half an hour, the specialist said, it meant the nerve was bruised, not cut — that everything would be fine, and your footballing life could roll on. If you’re under for a few hours, he added, the news won’t be so good. It will mean we’ve had to slice some nerve from your foot and
move it further up your leg, solving the problem but meaning you won’t play football again. Ever.

In the afternoon Trengove, 17, was wheeled into the operating theatre at the Mercy Hospital. When he woke up, he had blurry eyes and a fuzzy mind, but he knew exactly what to ask the nurse who was standing in his room.

“How long did the operation go for?” were his first words.

“Oh, it was quick,” she said. “It was only half an hour or so.”

Trengove had no idea his footballing future was on the line when a Victorian teammate tumbled across his leg during a training session in June, tearing his hamstring from the bone behind his knee.

As he hobbled off the oval, he was convinced he would be fine, that he’d sit at home, ice it for a while and play again the next weekend. No problem. Within a couple of days he understood how much damage he’d done, that he wouldn’t play again in his final junior season and he wouldn’t have another to show the AFL recruiters what he could do. It was a few
weeks later that he realised his limp right foot wasn’t getting any better, that the nerve leading to it, damaged in his fi rst operation, wasn’t going to mend itself.

“It was a bit shocking, because I came out of the first operation on my knee and I was telling myself to feel positive, and feeling positive, and then I had to stop and think: something isn’t right here,” he said.

“You go through all sorts of things, feeling shocked and worried and uncertain. You go from feeling in control and feeling like you’ll be fine, to not knowing. It really frustrated me. It was a hard
thing to go through.”

Trengove had his leg examined again last Friday, and found out it was looking much better than it had been just three weeks earlier. It validated the confidence building in his mind and, better yet, it was written on a piece of paper for the clubs that have grilled him to see.

“I always felt like it was going to come good. But it’s probably better for the clubs than for me, to see it there and read it and know that it’s true,” he said.

STILL, Trengove has some mystery about him heading into this morning’s national AFL draft. The aggressive, athletic Strathmore teenager is one of four potential first-round picks who hasn’t played a lot of football in recent times, and one of six or seven players who could find themselves at AFL clubs they were sure they hadn’t convinced of their abilities.
Even Western Bulldogs recruit Ayce Cordy endured 12 nervous, sickening hours after injuring his shoulder in May — feeling more relaxed, and motivated to rehabilitate once the Dogs called to assure him he would definitely be headed there as a father-son pick.

He wasn’t alone. Six weeks after he injured his shoulder during a trial game for the South Australian under- 18 team in May — feeling desperately relieved that he hadn’t done more serious damage — Phil Davis lasted little more than a half in his first game of the national championships before diving to smother a ball and feeling his arm shoved backwards as his shoulder pushed forward. This time, he needed an operation. This time, his final junior season was through. But even before he knew for sure, all he would miss out on starting rolled through his mind.

“It sort of hit me straight up, as soon as I did it,” said Davis, a tall, bounding defender who has played through the ranks at North Adelaide and for his school since moving to Adelaide from Canberra as a 14-year old.

“It was more of a shock than anything else because, when I played that game, I was convinced I was right, I was sure of it and then, bang, I did it again in my first game back and I pretty much knew I wouldn’t be playing too much footy in a while.

“I was a bit devastated. I knew I’d be missing the rest of the under-18s, the trip to Melbourne. I had a few games of school footy to come and I was captain of that team, so I really wanted to play. I’d wanted to try and play a few games for North Adelaide, to make that team and play a few games there and all of a sudden that was over too and I had to stand by and watch.”

"I really started thinking of the things I'd be missing out on, and at the end of it all was the draft. Initially, it really is hard, because you feel like you're going to slip right down the order, that people might forget who you are. You feel like it could be over. I was thinking about next year, thinking that at least if I had a good year at North Adelaide, then maybe I'd get drafted that way."

Liam Jones felt a similar surge of emotion when he injured his knee early this year — after playing just one game for Scotch College, where he had just started year 11 on scholarship. He felt a little shaken; like Davis, he had set himself a long list of goals for the season, and wouldn't get to achieve them. But he was 17, and knew it wasn't over ; if he wasn't drafted this year, he told himself, he would just try again next year.

"I accepted that bad luck happens, and that there's no point getting depressed over it," said the tall and agile teenager, who spent a few days at home in Hobart this week after doing his last exam on Tuesday. "I've had a lot of good luck in the past. I just decided to do my recovery the best I could and do everything I could and know that if I didn't get picked, I'd be in a good position for next year."

Tom Swift consoled himself with a similar thought— eventually — at Easter last year, when he twisted his knee in an AIS-AFL Academy game and had to have it reconstructed. "I thought the clubs wouldn't look too positively on it, that it was over for me," he said. "But then I started to be more positive." Back at the start of this season, he played a few games for the Claremont colts side, then, in the final trial game for the Western Australian state team, he landed awkwardly, jarred his other knee and damaged ligaments. He hasn't played since; a ball magnet and one of the quickest, creative players in the the under-16 championships two years ago, he has managed only a few scratchy, unfit games since.

Swift could be one of the best players to come out of this draft; he is also one of the riskier picks.

The clubs face a quandary: how do you assess players you haven't seen in a very long while? How do you figure out where to place them in a draft that is considered strong, especially in the first two rounds and taking in the fact that only two clubs — Melbourne and West Coast — have extra early picks and perhaps a little more room to make risky choices? How high is too high for a player who has overcome a serious injury or, more pointedly, is in the process of overcoming a serious injury?

It is, said Collingwood recruiting manager Derek Hine, tricky on a few fronts. The first, most important, thing, he said, was to check out their medical status as thoroughly as possible. Only the AFL is able to authorise scans or tests on a draft prospect — a club can request whatever tests it wants, and the results are forwarded to all clubs — but, in analysing what it all means, the teams need to call in their own doctors, and tap into resources beyond their recruiting departments. "I think that's the first thing you do — ascertain what's happening with the injury," said Hine. "Has it been a repetitive injury? That's where you really rely on the various medical authorities, whether it be the AFL's people or your own medical staff, making a full assessment on whether the kid's going to make a full recovery and, if he is, when will he be playing again and what are the chances of him repeating the injury.

"You go through that and then in making the assessment of his playing ability, and where that sits, you've just got to go back through their history, to the last time you saw them. In Tom Swift's case, the last time he had some real continuity in playing was when he was in the under-16s. So you go back, look at that, have a look at how he's grown and look at his testing at the time and where he's at now — has it improved, has it not? You gather as much data as you possibly can to make the comparison, and this year's quite unique in that you've got two or three players who, had they played the whole season, may well have been rated a lot higher than where they actually end up on draft day."

Swift could have played a few games at the end of the season, but decided he was better off not risking himself; he did a heap of cross-training to get himself ready for the draft camp, and, after shooting up a few centimetres in the past year, tested as one of the quickest players there and hoped he had eased recruiters' minds. "I'm disappointed with what's happened, it's been a frustrating time, but I came back and played after my first injury and it sort of proved to me that I can come back from adversity," he said. "I think I can do it again."

Cordy flew to Arizona yesterday with his new Bulldog teammates, his mind long eased and his shoulder almost all better, and Jones is desperate just to play football again — anywhere, never mind if a club drafts him or not. Trengove has been running and doing some training with the Calder Cannons, while waiting for today to arrive, and Davis will be ready to start training with whichever club drafts him, too. For him, it was being invited to the draft camp in October, and meeting the recruiters, that convinced him he would not be neglected. "I had a lot of support and a lot of people telling me that I'd still get drafted, that it would all be fine," he said. "That really helped, but in the back of your mind, until it happens, I guess you're always wondering … The best thing about the draft camp was talking to the clubs, and meeting all of them. It sort of reassured me, that people still knew who I was."

CASE STUDY AYCE CORDY

AYCE Cordy took an international flight yesterday, feeling very lucky to be spending his second week with the Western Bulldogs on camp in Arizona, but determined to put it to good use. "I've timed it very nicely," said Cordy, the club's first-round father-son recruit, whose fellow draftees will have to wait another week to meet their new teammates. "I'm still really new to just knowing everyone, and knowing how a football club works. It will be a good chance to get to know all the players who will hopefully be my teammates in the near future."

Cordy had been on the Bulldogs' radar for some time before this season, but when he injured his shoulder in just his third school game this year he felt like even that option might be over. For a few hours at least. "For about 12 hours I was feeling pretty miserable. I'd built myself up for such a year and I didn't know what it would mean with the Bulldogs," said the 18-year-old (former) Geelong College student, who was able to get some work done after his season-ending surgery and hopes for an ENTER score big enough to get him into a biomedical science course at Melbourne University.

"The next day the Bulldogs called me and said, 'Mate, don't worry, we're going to pick you no matter what so you should go and get the surgery done and make sure you're up and ready to go next year'. I went from feeling quite devastated to a lot more comforted and motivated, all in the space of a day, but until I got that phone call, I honestly didn't know what they would think. I thought it might have been over for me."

CASE STUDY LIAM JONES

HAVING been at Scotch College for only a few months — as part of the indigenous scholarship program — Liam Jones felt a little guilty when his knee locked up during training after the school's first game of the season.

He also had to re-work some goals. Jones was completely shocked when told last September that he had been picked in the AIS-AFL Academy, and it took him a few months to feel comfortable among teammates he was sure must be better players than him.

It was only in January — while spending a week training at St Kilda, running alongside Nick Riewoldt — that the 17-year-old key position prospect felt like he could be an AFL player too. "I was sort in awe of the other kids in the squad before that, but training with the Saints sort of pointed out to me that I really wanted to do it," said the son of Bob Jones, who played 20 games for St Kilda in the late 1980s. Born in Devonport, Liam grew up in Hobart with his two sisters and mother, Janine, visiting his dad every couple of Christmases in Darwin. "Training with Nick Riewoldt, I saw how hard he worked and my goal was to get my endurance up this year and model myself on him. But then, it all changed."

Jones had surgery in July and wasn't too worried about what it meant for the draft; he had another year in the under-18s if he needed it — he will be completing year 12 next year — and had school work to get stuck into. His leadership and diligence impressed everyone at his new school. At the draft camp in October, Jones decided what he said would be as important as what he did.

"I really wanted to do well in the interviews, to be myself and try and show the clubs what I was like as a person. Doing that felt good. I got a bit more confidence that I might actually be drafted after all."