Simmonds desperate to recapture his best
1:03 PM Mon 3 December, 2007
By Jason Phelan
for richmondfc.com.au
AFTER a year he'd rather forget, Troy Simmonds feels better than he has for a long while and is determined to recapture the form that saw him finish third in the Jack Dyer Medal count in 2006.
Injuries restricted the Tiger ruckman to just 10 games this past season, but even when he did take the field, he was physically unable to replicate the stellar form he had exhibited less than 12 months earlier.
"It was a hard year personally and a hard year for the club," Simmonds says of Richmond's three-win season.
"A lot of things were going on and at the end of it I just said 'I've got to put all that behind me'.
"I went to New York for a month, pretty much by myself, and just spent a lot of time there and thought about what I needed to do over the pre-season and how I could get back to my form that I showed in 2006.
"I've come back really refreshed and I'm enjoying the training. I'm feeling like I'm ready to go; I'm over everything. The ankle's good, it's really responded well.
"This is probably the best I've felt since I broke my ankle back in January. I had that bit of time off and worked out what I needed to do and I'm starting to feel really good again within myself physically and mentally as well, which is important too."
While his badly broken ankle was responsible for ruining most of his season, it wasn't the most serious setback the luckless ruckman would have to contend with in 2007.
A potentially life threatening blood clot was found on his lung after round 18 which brought an immediate end to his season.
"It was a real shock because you don't really think that would be something that would happen to a young, fit athlete," Simmonds recalls.
"But it just shows it can happen to anyone. I knew within myself that something wasn't right.
"We're still not exactly sure where it came from, but I believe it might have come from a heavy bump I copped against Sydney the week before we played Geelong.
"I really noticed the effects against Geelong; I was coming off every five minutes and I couldn't breathe properly.
"I didn't train much that week and then I played against Geelong and I knew then something wasn't right. The week after I thought it might have been a bit of a flu bug or a virus, but I wasn't getting any symptoms of that.
"That week I went to run a few laps and I couldn't even finish one, so I went in to Mercy Hospital and got a CT scan which showed there was a clot.
"I was getting these sharp stabbing pains through my back and shoulder and once the CT showed the clot I was straight into hospital."
Four days and dozens of blood thinning treatments later, Simmonds emerged from hospital, but his battle wasn't over by a long shot.
He will remain on the blood thinning medicine until just after Christmas, which he says is just precautionary, but he happily reports the treatment hasn't hindered his pre-season preparation at all.
He and his fellow veterans have been back on the training track since early November and, in addition to his own progress, he's been buoyed by what he's seen from his teammates.
"I've definitely noticed a hunger around the club over the last month, as there should be after a disappointing year," he says.
"The senior group from (captain) Kane Johnson downwards has really come together and there's a real drive there.
"I think the senior guys will really step up this year and play some good footy and with the younger guys getting some good game time into them last year, I think that will be beneficial this time around.
"We've picked up some good kids in the draft, Trent Cotchin seems like he's ready to go, so I think that experience will certainly help us.
"We've done a lot of work in the off-season in getting together with the coaches and working out where we need to go and that's certainly evident in our training."
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