North Melbourne coach Rhyce Shaw has confirmed that captain Jack Ziebell suffered a medial ligament injury in his side’s Round 1 victory over St Kilda.
Shaw admits the injury "doesn’t look good", but given the postponement of the season, Ziebell will likely be available for Round 2 regardless.
“He’s done a medial. Not sure how bad, it doesn’t look great though,” he said.
“It could be a few weeks, but that’s not going to matter for his rehab so he should be fine.”
Shaw doesn’t believe Ziebell’s injury requires surgery, but at this stage doesn’t know how they would go about getting the surgery done, given the current COVID-19 climate.
“We were discussing that last night, how do we go about the surgery that guys might need and it’s an interesting landscape,” he said.
“If Jack does need (surgery), how do we go about that? Where do we get it from? What are we allowed to do? We’ll work through that today.
“At this point it doesn’t seem like he needs surgery, but who knows what will come through in the MRI.”
Defender Josh Walker had an ugly fall in the game, landing on the back of his neck.
However, he put out a tweet last night saying he was fine.
Appreciate the well wishes, I’m all good, necks a bit stiff but looks like there’ll be plenty of time for that to recover... 🔵⚪️🔵 https://t.co/zMkcS3BGas
— Josh Walker (@walkerjosh14) March 22, 2020
Shaw said they will make sure he is okay before the club goes on break.
“I spoke to Josh last night and he said he’s pretty comfortable. Obviously it was a pretty disturbing incident, but he seemed okay after the game,” he said.
“We’ll be making sure we check in with him and making sure he’s okay before he goes away.”
The Kangaroos coach was proud of the performance of his players, coming from behind to overrun St Kilda on Saturday afternoon.
“It was a great win and we asked the boys for a special effort at half-time and they did that. They produced and they responded and we’re really proud of our guys,” he said.
“I was really proud of what they did and how they went about it, led by Ben Cunnington and the boys that jumped on board with that and the whole team just responded.”