Get the latest injury report ahead of Thursday night's Round 1 match against Carlton at the MCG.
Jack Graham (hamstring)
"Jack's available to play this week. Jack's been back training with the main group for the last two weeks after an interrupted pre-season. The last two weeks have been really good. During his rehab process prior to that, he'd done a heap of running, covered a heap of distance, a heap of high-speed running, so his conditioning base is really good and the last two weeks he's been able to participate in skills. So, he's a little bit ahead of schedule and he's available for selection this week. Where he plays, we'll talk about as a match committee and make that decision."
Dylan Grimes (thumb)
"Dylan trained today (Tuesday) and also on Sunday. So, Dylan's completed the full session today, it looks like he'll potentially be available for Thursday night. But, we'll do a final tick off with the medical team, Dylan and the match committee and assess that."
Kamdyn McIntosh (calf)
"Kamdyn played against Hawthorn in the game down in Tassie and pulled up with a sore calf, and it's taken a little bit longer to recover than we would have anticipated from the game. So, he's going to be unavailable this week. If the game had been a couple of days later on the weekend, he probably would have been available, but like with most soft tissue injuries, we'd prefer to take the week to make sure he's absolutely right for Round 2."
Nick Vlastuin (hamstring)
"Nick's, unfortunately, had a little bit of a setback. He had a fairly minor incident in the Geelong practice match and we had scans the following week which cleared him of any damage, and we just put him through a short rehab phase of running and kicking. Kicking was the actual original injury, he did it on a kick in the Geelong game. So, he had three rehab sessions where he kicked and felt pretty good and we put him back into the main group late last week, and just at the very start of his warm-up, on one of his kicks, he didn't feel very comfortable and sustained a little bit of further damage. Not major damage, but enough for us to say he's not ready to go. We're just going to have to take a little bit of a longer approach with his rehabilitation. It's a really tricky one, you've got hamstring injuries that you get running really fast, and you've got these hamstring injuries that occasionally occur with kicking, and they can be very tricky, and the rehab and the return from those needs to be carefully progressed. We're going to need to take a bit more time and care with his rehabilitation. We're thinking he'll miss a couple of weeks, it's very hard to put a time frame (on it), but hopefully not too long."
Kane Lambert (hip)
"Last time we spoke, there was all sorts of talk out there around surgery and surgeons. As I said last time, we were consulting various different specialists and he was undergoing some other therapies that we've just completed. The decision with Kane is that he's not having any surgery, he's increasing his training load and progressing his training. If he can stand up and train at that higher intensity and get a number of weeks under his belt, we'll then explore match play. What's important to note with Kane with his hip injury, is that he's had three previous surgeries on this same hip and also one on his other hip. The one we're dealing with at the moment, he's had significant management issues with it in the last year to two years. The last five years really...he's played in three Grand Finals with this hip injury, albeit that it wasn't as bad. But, as he's gotten a little bit older and played more games, it's become more of a management issue. So, we've spoken to all the specialists and got the best advice, and amongst Kane, the specialists, and our medical team, this is the plan that everyone has agreed upon and that's what we're going to progress forward with. So, Kane's increasing his training and we're really looking forward to seeing where that takes us over the next couple of weeks."
Sam Banks (quad)
"He's completed now a full week of football training. 'Banksy' has had a couple of niggles over the pre-season. What we'd like to see is another week or two of full football training, given he's a young first-year draftee. What's important to remember with these first-year players, is the last two to three years, they haven't played a lot of football because of COVID. So, we're taking a more careful approach with those young guys, we want them to have long careers and we want them to have the best chance to finish this season injury-free. He won't play this week in the VFL, but we'll look at it for the following week."