GWS Giants defender Jack Buckley has had a long road back from a knee reconstruction

His Greater Western Sydney teammates all convened to watch. They cheered as he began pacing around the club’s training oval at Homebush. But something was awry.

“I went to do my first run, which would have been December 2021. I remember taking off and everyone makes a big fuss,” Buckley recalls.

“And I did a lap, and I was like, ‘Oh no, this doesn’t feel great’, but I can’t come out here, do one lap after all that fuss and go in.”

He kept going for a bit until the commotion died down, then went to get the knee checked by medicos. Sent to his surgeon, it was determined that things weren’t going to plan. He was going to need to go under the knife again for a clean-out, pushing back his likely return.

It had all been going so well for Buckley. Recruited as a Category B rookie by the Giants at the end of 2017, he had taken almost three years to make his senior debut but established himself as a regular in the backline in 2021 and was on track to figure in the club’s run to an unlikely finals berth.

Then in the early moments of the meeting with the Dees at the MCG, Buckley fell awkwardly across James Harmes in a marking contest. He hobbled off the ground in the hands of medicos knowing something was wrong, but never did he think that it would be more than 20 months before his next AFL appearance.

The diagnosis meant a reconstruction. There is no good time to do an ACL, but the middle of 2021 was particularly inopportune logistically. The Giants were stuck in Melbourne as part of a Covid-19 hub.

“About five days post-surgery they had this emergency meeting at 9.30pm,” Buckley says.

“And they’re like, ‘We’re flying to Queensland at 7AM tomorrow morning. We’ve got to flee the state because of Covid’. And I’m just like up the back thinking, ‘Oh my god I can’t do that’. And they sent everyone off to go pack all of their stuff. And I was just sitting there and Leon (Cameron) saw me and said, ‘Don’t worry we’ve sorted something out, it’s all good’.”

So he stayed another night in Melbourne, before eventually returning to Sydney where he was cared for by his father and then North Melbourne chairman Ben.

Soon enough Jack was able to return to the club, but it was a lonely place.

“It was just me and Lachie Keeffe at the club each day with the physio,” Buckley says.

“Early days it did feel a bit isolated.”

It was slow going in his rehab to start with, but things looked to be advancing reasonably well come late in 2021. Then came his running misadventure, the first setback in what would prove to be a frustrating six-month stretch.

“Then I had that surgery, which ended up being a bit more of a setback than what we thought. I lost all my quad muscle off the back of it,” Buckley says.

He started running again with the aim of getting back mid-year, but nothing was straightforward.

“But there were just a lot of benchmarks that I wasn’t hitting, and I wasn’t getting close. I sort of had a running joke that I was always four weeks from being four weeks away.”

As the Giants’ 2022 season quickly faded, the club decided to reset Buckley’s goals, aiming instead for a return at the start of 2023.

Eventually the corner was turned and Buckley got a solid run of training together. He played a VFL practice game in early March and was named an emergency for the round one game against Adelaide.

He was told the day before that game that there was a slight issue with fellow backman Leek Aleer’s quad.

“And then the night before the game they said, ‘You’re not playing in the VFL practice match before the Adelaide game’,” he says.

“And I thought, ‘Geez maybe I am a sniff.’ I got to the ground and I still didn’t know. It was funny, I walked in with (housemate and teammate) Connor Idun and I said, ‘I’m not going to go snooping around. I’m just going to stick to myself but go have a look and see if you can get anything yourself’. He went looking around and he came back out and he said, ‘You’re in!’

“He’d been there through all of it, so it was a pretty cool moment to share with him, and him be the one to tell me.

“I was trying to figure out on the fly what my pre-game routine was because it had been so long.”

Buckley makes a note to point out Aleer’s selflessness in pulling out.

As it turned out, the match was an epic, with GWS coming from more than five goals down to win Adam Kingsley’s first game at the helm.

“And then it ended up being about 50 degrees and 70 per cent humidity. By the fourth quarter I was like, ‘I remember it being hard but not this hard’.

“It was a pretty special moment after the game.

“To prove to myself that I can still play, that was a big moment for sure.”

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Having been deprived the chance to play for so long, Buckley says he now treats every game as his last. And his form has been strong too. While the Giants fell narrowly to Carlton last Saturday, Buckley held his own against reigning Coleman Medallist Charlie Curnow.

“All you want to do is get out there and play with your mates but you can’t get your body right to do it. So now that the body is finally right, just being out there and being a part of it and contributing to the team is really exciting,” Buckley says.

“During the week you’ve got purpose, whereas long-term rehab, the weeks can tend to blend together a bit.”