Glebe Dirty Reds coach Aaron Zammit powers through gruesome injury: ‘My kneecap was around my groin’

He’s pretty sure he’s the first person to coach a side while sitting in the boot of a Toyota Corolla.

He might also be the first coach to ever fall asleep mid match.

The longtime Dirty Reds coach was forced into the makeshift set-up for Glebe’s Ron Massey Cup clash with Penrith Brothers after he suffered a devastating knee injury playing touch footy a week ago.

“I ruptured my patella tendon, fractured the patella and chipped a bone off … whatever the long bone is,” Zammit told CODE Sports. “No one even touched me. I just stepped off my right, and my left was there to balance. I was gonna go through and score – as I do – but when I landed on my left, it just went. It sounded like a tree branch snapping.

“I just face planted, and when I looked down, my kneecap was seriously up around my groin. It was like ‘what the hell is that?’ It was horrendous.

“I just had to push it back down and wait for the ambulance.”

There are technical medical terms for the various injuries he picked up, but Zammit says the doctor put it bluntly: “He just said it basically imploded. It was a mess.”

Zammit doesn’t know the full details of what the doctors did during his surgery on Friday, but he thinks it had something to do with cutting his hamstring to fashion a new tendon for his knee.

There are a few plates or bolts holding his kneecap in place as well.

After less than a day in hospital, he checked himself out on Saturday afternoon and began preparing for the undefeated Glebe’s Sunday game.

Then the painkillers wore off.

“I think I had about 20 minutes’ sleep,” he said. “It’s a 20 out of 10 pain. I’ve never had pain anything like this, ever.”

The only way he was able to do the job on Sunday was to reverse his Corolla into position near the starting boxes at the greyhound track at Wentworth Park.

“I popped the boot up, put the back seats down flat – as if you’re gonna shag someone in the back – and I laid down there with a walkie-talkie to talk to the assistants.

“It was actually a pretty good view to be honest.”

By then though, the pain was almost too much to bear, so he popped an Endone pill about 10 minutes before kick-off.

“I just wanted to be pain free so I could concentrate on the game,” he says. “About 10 minutes into it, I was on cloud nine.

“The players were floating around, I couldn’t concentrate at all.”

On the pitch, Glebe converted a 16-12 halftime lead into a 30-22 victory to stay undefeated after five games.

Not that Zammit saw all of it.

“It was after we scored our second or third try. I just laid back and thought, ‘I’m just going to close my eyes for one minute’,” he says. “Next second, my dad shook me through the window and said, ‘You alright?’

“I lifted my head and I’d missed about three minutes of the game.”

Funnily enough, it’s not the first time Zammit has been rendered unconscious mid-game.

In the 2020 Presidents Cup elimination semi-final, Zammit knocked himself out cold when he jumped in the air and hit his head on a metal pylon in one of the boxes at Leichhardt Oval.

He missed the Matt Stimson try that sealed Glebe’s path to the Grand Final a week later, but only has fuzzy memories of the rest of the match.

“If I was a player, I‘d be gone for HIA and I wouldn’t have come back,” he said at the time.

It’s just another tale to add to the steadily growing list of bizarre coaching stories Zammit – who celebrates his 43rd birthday today – can tell.

“I’ve done some strange things in my coaching career,” he says. “Last year I had a sore appendix and watched half a game livestreamed in the bathroom with a walkie talkie.

“Now I’ve done one out the back of a car.

“I reckon getting stuck in an elevator is the next one.”