Given how his AFL season began, Christian Salem’s sturdiness during the last 4 months exhibits it is a participant who relishes exhausting work and a problem.
It is well-documented that the 28-year-old premiership defender didn’t return till spherical 10 due to a thyroid drawback after which a knee harm.
Salem dropped 5kg due to the thyroid difficulty and he suspects that led on to the knee drawback, which additionally adopted two knee surgical procedures final yr.
So not one of the best AFL preparation, plus Salem stays on medicine and he has fortnightly blood assessments to watch his thyroid situation.
He has not missed a sport since returning to Melbourne’s senior crew.
“It’s hard to explain … I didn’t really know how I would feel,” Salem informed AAP about spherical 10.
“To be able to get through so far, I still demand my standards – I want to keep improving and improving.
“But I’ve received my physique in a spot now the place I’m able to reset and assault the finals collection.
“It’s exciting, I’ve been here for 10 years and this is only my fourth finals series. They don’t come around every day.”
The self-control inherent in Salem’s profitable comeback comes as no shock to Demons captain Max Gawn.
“Sales is one of our biggest competitors. What you see on the outside is his silky left foot (kick) and that’s fair enough, because it is a pretty silky left foot,” Gawn mentioned.
“But in terms of what we value internally, certainly he doesn’t get beaten one-on-one and he’s competitive, which if you look at the Melbourne DNA, I feel like they’re two things we would put pretty high up on our whiteboard.
“We missed him in that first half of the yr.”
Gawn also noted that Salem’s return has allowed fellow backman Trent Rivers more freedom to play up the ground and occasionally go into the midfield.
Indeed, the Demons boast a rock-solid backline. Rightly, there has been plenty of focus ahead of this finals series on St Kilda’s defence under Ross Lyon and the All Australian seasons from Cal Wilkie and Jack Sinclair.
But in terms of points against, Melbourne are only 13 behind them as the most frugal team.
“Especially in finals and in massive video games, contest and defence arise,” Salem mentioned.
“You do not see too many offence-exploiting kinds of video games.
“We’ve built our game off contest and defence and we want to bring a high level of that.
“We’ve put ourselves in a great place, just a few good comeback wins, however it all goes again to zero-zero now.”
Source: www.perthnow.com.au
