Mercurial forward Josh Rachele will return to the Adelaide Crows line-up for Friday night’s do-or-die AFL semifinal against Hawthorn at Adelaide Oval.<\/p>\n
Rachele has been sidelined for more than two months with a knee injury.<\/p>\n
Crows coach Matthew Nicks said the 22-year-old’s return would be a boost for his side, as it looked to bounce back from its qualifying final loss to Collingwood and the continued absence of suspended star Izak Rankine.<\/p>\n
“Josh’s weapon is his energy, and what that does to help the guys around him,” Nicks said.<\/p>\n
“That energy will be important and his execution, it’s going to be a tough ask with the speed of the game and things, being out of footy for that amount of time.<\/p>\n
“It’s hard to hit the ground running straight away.”<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Rachele has been sidelined for more than two months with a knee injury. (Getty Images: Mark Brake)<\/p>\n
Rachele tore the posterior capsular in his left knee along with suffering a bone compression injury during the Crows’ round 17 win over Melbourne.<\/a><\/p>\n Nicks said Rachele had been diligent during his recovery.<\/p>\n ABC Sport Daily podcast<\/a><\/p>\n ABC Sport Daily is your daily sports conversation. We dive into the biggest story of the day and get you up to speed with everything else that’s making headlines.<\/p>\n “We won’t be rolling the dice, the question is he ready to go, and yeah he’s ready to go,” Nicks said.<\/p>\n “Ten weeks of hard work and he should get the reward for that.<\/p>\n “We do because he’s ready and he trained really well.”<\/p>\n Rachele has kicked 25 goals from 13 games during his injury-interrupted 2025 season.<\/p>\n Last month, he was named in the AFL Players’ Association’s 22Under22 team for the third time.<\/p>\n ABC Sport is live blogging every round of the AFL<\/a> and NRL<\/a> seasons in 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mercurial forward Josh Rachele will return to the Adelaide Crows line-up for Friday night’s do-or-die AFL semifinal against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":134454,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[9126,638,64,63,55,639,16118,6854,3899,45746,3512,16712,25906,85],"class_list":["post-134453","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-adelaide-crows","tag-afl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-hawks","tag-hawthorn","tag-injury","tag-josh-rachele","tag-knee-injury","tag-matthew-nicks","tag-semifinal","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=134453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/134453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/134454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=134453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=134453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=134453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}