Fremantle forward Josh Corbett has revealed the challenges he’s faced throughout his career as he continues to recover from his long-term hip replacement, on this week's Better Down Back Podcast.
Corbett underwent a full hip replacement in November of 2023, with the forward eyeing a return to AFL football after a procedure that no one has ever returned to the highest level of competition from before.
Despite his debilitating injury, it is not the first time the 28-year-old has overcome significant injury odds in football.
“I got drafted a little bit later at 22 years of age. I had a bit of a sniff at the end of my second year in the VFL, I had a few clubs asking how I was going, Corbett revealed on the Club’s Better Down Back Podcast.
“I put in a really strong preseason, was in career best nick, feeling really sharp and went out and played some really consistent footy early days.
“Down at Frankston one day I went to take a mark and just got a stray finger in my eye.
“I thought it was nothing so just went off and put some saline solution in there and my vision just went completely black….causing me to be blind in my eye for about a month.
“Footy was canned for the rest of the year and essentially my prescription was to go into a dark room, don’t read anything, don’t look at anything, don’t expose yourself to sunlight, and for someone that is pretty sociable like myself it was a pretty challenging period.
“The other thing that was pretty daunting was I had pretty much put all my eggs into this basket of hopefully getting to play AFL.
“It was halfway through the year, I didn’t know if I had done enough.”
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Regardless of the setback, Corbett made his way onto Gold Coast’s list in 2018, before being traded to Fremantle in 2022.
The challenges got no easier for the key forward, managing only five games for Fremantle in his first year with the Club before going under the knife in November to replace his hip.
“I’m probably about 40 years younger than I probably would have thought of having a hip replacement to be honest!,” Corbett joked.
“It’s something that I never thought I would have had to considered in my time (playing AFL), but my hip just got to the point where I couldn’t run properly and essentially couldn’t do my job of playing football.
“I made that decision to go and get it sorted and six months down the track we are looking at trying to get back into some more football drills in the not-so-distant future.”
Corbett admits there is no ‘blueprint’ for a return to AFL following a hip injury.
“No one has got back to play AFL and that’s my goal, to be the first,” Corbett said.
“The tricky part is that it’s never been done before, there’s no real blueprint of ‘the 12-week mark you should be doing this, the 16-week mark you should be doing that’.
“It’s the things you sort of take for granted sometimes, as simple as being able to ride a bike properly.
“The early days (after surgery) some of the memories were funniest when at Cockburn up here in the pools, just doing some gentle walking in the water with myself and the average age of (everyone else is) 65.
“We are all there comparing our notes from surgery about how did you go, who was your surgeon, how was the pain and all that sort of stuff."
