Western Bulldogs confirm Tom Liberatore’s return plan, Beveridge candid on concussion concerns
In short: The Western Bulldogs have been given a morale boost ahead of facing top side Sydney on Thursday night, with premiership midfielder Tom Liberatore given a pathway to return to AFL.
The club says it has devised a plan to allow the 32-year-old to return to playing next month, after he has twice collapsed on field this season.
What’s next? Coach Luke Beveridge says he will be nervous for Liberatore when he returns, as well as for other Bulldogs players given the club’s recent encounters with the ongoing issue of concussions.
Western Bulldogs coach Luke Beveridge says the club has put “a lot of time and commitment” into Tom Liberatore’s return to football.
But the premiership coach says he is increasingly concerned about any of his players getting a concussion, even if they’ve never had one before.
The Bulldogs on Monday confirmed its star on-baller will return to AFL action next month after being sidelined with a nasty head injury against Hawthorn in Round Eight.
The incident followed Liberatore collapsing on the field with no-one near him during a match in April.
Last week, the Bulldogs’ much-hyped 2023 draftee Aiden O’Driscoll retired on medical advice without playing a single senior game due to a concussion sustained in January.
Liberatore has been training with the side in recent weeks, and Beveridge said on Tuesday he can do everything a player needs to.
“We’ll introduce him to the main football drills prior to his return to play. If he’s comfortable, he’ll come back into the team,” Beveridge said.
“The topic of concussion at the moment and the effect of it on our game and how sensitive we are to our players’ health, it’s a challenge to talk about. It’s not like he’s just out of the woods, he comes back and plays and everything’s OK.
“Each time anyone who has never had a concussion goes [into] a collision-type situation, you hold your breath. Sometimes you even think, ‘Don’t go for this one, happy for him to mark it,’ because you can see the velocity, the commitment of the players and our guys have rarely pulled out of those.
“With Tom, when he comes back, there will still be that nervousness he might cop another knock. I was talking to him this morning about technique and craft and some of the situations where he’s been hit in the head, and what we can do to mitigate against it happening again.
“We’ll do a bit of work with that in between now and when he returns to play. Ground level stuff, he just charges in head-first, you know, we can do it in other ways, which he has in the past.”
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