Adelaide young gun Dan Curtin has avoided a dreaded season-ending knee injury, but could still miss the AFL season start.<\/p>\n
The full extent of the 20-year-old’s setback has yet to be determined, after Curtin hurt his knee in a wrestling drill during pre-season training on Monday.<\/p>\n
But the Crows confirmed Curtin has dislocated his kneecap, and the recovery is expected to be at least six weeks.<\/p>\n
Adelaide’s round-one fixture is away against Collingwood on March 14, giving Curtin nearly eight weeks for rehabilitation.<\/p>\n
The Western Australian was one of last year’s breakout young stars, enjoying an eye-catching patch of form in his second year in the AFL.<\/p>\n
After seven games in his debut campaign, Curtin played a crucial role across 23 games to help the Crows seal last year’s minor premiership before featuring in both finals losses, to Collingwood and Hawthorn.<\/p>\n
Curtin isn’t the only AFL star to have suffered a knee injury this pre-season, with Carlton forward Jesse Motlop and North Melbourne defender Jackson Archer ruled out with ACL injuries.<\/p>\n
The bad news from the Blues and Kangaroos came as clubs return to official pre-season training after the Christmas-New Year break.<\/p>\n
Luckless Hawthorn midfielder Will Day will also miss the start of the season, with a return timeline yet to be determined, after dislocating his right shoulder last week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Adelaide young gun Dan Curtin has avoided a dreaded season-ending knee injury, but could still miss the AFL…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":423879,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[560],"tags":[638,216847,64,63,55,639,54914,3512,11330,85,34325,29646],"class_list":["post-423878","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-afl","tag-afl","tag-afl-season","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-australian-football-league","tag-australianfootballleague","tag-dan-curtin","tag-knee-injury","tag-pre-season-training","tag-sports","tag-the-crows","tag-young-stars"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423878","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=423878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/423878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/423879"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=423878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=423878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=423878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}