The Melbourne Demons AFLW finals prospects are hanging by a thread after only one win and three losses this season, but 2022 premiership winner Blaithin Mackin is keeping her glass half full despite breaking down with a calf injury that will sideline her for most of the remaining six rounds of the league season.
The Shane O’Neills and Armagh footballer experienced calf soreness in last weekend’s defeat to Fremantle and overnight scans have confirmed that the younger Mackin sibling will be out for at least the next three weeks.
“Blaithin was pulled from the Fremantle game in the first quarter with calf tightness,” Melbourne AFLW High-Performance Manager Sam Batterton said
“We tested on the bench and took a conservative route, given she had some symptoms.
“It’s been scanned at the start of this week, and she has a confirmed calf strain, so will miss this week and the next couple after that.”
Blaithin has this week given a fascinating ‘day in the life’ insight about how she spends her time as an AFLW player 10,000 miles across the other side of the world in Melbourne.
She typically starts her day drinking her favourite warm beverage, skimmed milk cappuccino with extra chocolate, to kick start her metabolism on freezing Melbourne winter and early spring mornings.
Despite the Demons disappointing season to date, Blaithin has twice been named among Melbourne’s best players, and she booted an exquisite goal with the outside of her right foot to seal the club’s opening round victory away to Geelong last month.
“I think we all have to expect to push each other to be really clean (with the ball) and to drive each other standards (in game and in training),” Mackin explained.
A typical pre-training warm-up session involves three rounds of hurdle over unders, band hip abductions, and aqua bag hip locks repeated several times over at around 10:45am after a team meeting.
Melbourne’s main training sessions begins around 11:45am and can involve the use of Gaelic footballs. Mackin has impressed her teammates with her ‘keepie uppie’ skills this season and is equally adept at running with either a round ball or a ‘Sherrin’.
At 12:15pm Blaithin undertakes a weight session involving back squats with a weighted barbell, banded pull ups, and bench presses. She is also required to do one leg extensions using a dumbbell, followed by a 1pm pool session.
After a bowl of guacamole and pasta salad for lunch at 1:30pm, Blaithin, joins a 2:30pm pottery class with her teammates. She has taken to the art of wheel throwing like a duck to water and in her last class impressed her instructor by creating a perfectly formed plate which she hilariously named ‘Rheezer’.
“Only the good-looking ones,” she joked about her plate.
The only mistake the Blaithin made all day was leaving her smart watch behind in the pottery room which she had the good sense to retrieve before driving home.
In other news, Leitrim’s Áine Tighe, 32, is out of the remainder of the AFLW season after has rupturing her right Anterior Cruciate Ligament for the third time.
The Fremantle Dockers co-captain and a teammate of Forkhill woman Amy Mulholland, has been her club’s leading goalkicker in the past two seasons.
“We are all devastated for Áine,’ Fremantle head of AFLW Claire Heffernan said.
“She is an incredibly important player and leader in our team and will be sorely missed on the field for the remainder of the 2024 season.
“We have no doubt Áine will use every ounce of her determination to attack her rehabilitation with gusto.
“We as a club will be steadfast in our support of her and will go above and beyond to make sure she has everything she needs to heal and repair from this injury.”
