Every Word Cody Weightman Said on His Injury, Embracing Challenges, & The 'Fast' Bulldogs

To round off Western Bulldogs Memebership on 1116SEN, star small forward Cody Weightman joined Kane Cornes and Gerard Healy on Sportsday:

Kane Cornes: Unfortunately he won’t be there against North Melbourne in Round 1 of the season, which is unfortunate because he’s a budding star of the competition, love the way he plays, a high-flyer, he kicks goals and he puts bums on seats and it’s Western Bulldogs Membership Day, his name’s Cody Weightman. Cody, thanks for your time and welcome back to Sportsday.

Cody Weightman: G’day Kane. G’day Gerard

KC: How are we tracking? I’m devastated once again to see you break down, a different injury to you, you’ve had a number of unique challenges with your body, let’s put it that way. Where does this one sit?

CW: Yeah this could be the weirdest. I’ve been a bit unlucky, unfortunately, I’ve collected a fair few surgeries in my short career so far.  Yeah, a bit of a genetic one this one, I suppose it’s connected to a knock I collected around Christmas time and yeah had to unfortunately go under the knife again.

KC: Can you explain it for us

CW: Yeah it’s called a bipartite patella which is the bone on your kneecap. Basically everyone normally has two, one on each side, I have three. One of my merged into two at birth and where the fusion was between those two bones I got a knock right on that and essentially that’s cracked it, and caused that one bone that was acting as two to move and just caused me a bit of pain throughout the pre-season. We persisted with it, tried to give it a chance, but just wouldn’t go away, so I had to get it fixed.

Gerard Healy: So how do they actually fix it? I take it they screw it?

CW: Yeah, spot on. I had to get a bit of my hip put into my knee as well, so yeah a bit of a bone graft, a bit of missing bone in the knee where that gap was. But also two pins through the parts of the knee that connect them up but I think get those pins taken out when the bone grown back into one.

GW: Well sometimes when you’re having a bad run as you are it’s good to look at others who are having an even worse run to put yours into perspective, and when I heard today that Lincoln McCarthy’s redone an ACL I just felt so sorry for him. You’ll be back even soon enough but sometimes his injury puts yours into perspective.

CW: Yeah, that’s shocking. I’m not a huge football consumer. I didn’t actually know that and he’s one player that I watch a lot of edits of so I was looking forward to him coming back and he’s a really class player, so that’s devastating. Like you said, it is good to sometimes look around and realise that things aren’t bad and that we’ve got it pretty good as footballers.

KC: So just looking at your well-documented injury list. Big names, Dale, Richards, Treloar’s there, the Skipper (Marcus Bontempelli) is there, Johannisen’s still got a nasty hammy and yourself and I’m not sure if I mentioned Liam Jones. But the theme of trying to get yourself up when you know you’ve got those challenges. How has it been at the club and have you used some sort of motivation tool to get the boys up for this weekend’s game which won’t be easy?

CW: I don’t think you need much more motivation than Round 1 at this point of the year which is good, and I think it’s also pretty exciting the opportunity that's going to arise for a few boys, given that we've got a few injuries. I don’t think it’s as diabolical as a few people are saying,  we’ve got a few important injuries but we should have hopefully like Bailey Dale, Ed Richards, Laith Vandermeer who are important to our team structure. Hopefully, they’re available for Round 1 and I think it’d be nice to have Jonesey and Bont and stuff out there of course, but injuries is all part of footy and it’s about how well you can repair those injuries and it looks like we get a go at it from Round 1 this year and hopefully that contributes to our depth which will be really important later in the year when we get a couple of boys back.

GH: Yes, I saw the game against the Hawks down in Tassie and you looked pretty up and about, and the Bont wasn’t actually playing that day after the first two or three minutes and you uncovered a couple of really good players. You’ve got some younger players about to take the competition by storm like (Sam) Darcy, so I’m not as down on the Dogs even with your injuries as others, but that said, pre-season has been reversed in the opening round so beware.

CW: Yeah that’s it. It’s hard to know pre-season form whether that staks up or not so we’ll get a good idea against North, but certainly a good start and we’re looking to start our season a bit more on the front foot this year. We haven’t been able to beat the Dees in the past three years which has hurt our momentum early, but we’re looking to get on the front foot this year which will be nice if we can make that happen.,

JC: Is there anything in your gamestyle which you think we’ll notice a significant shift in this year throughout the pre-season

CW: Nothing changes too drastically. We still have a fair bit of confidence that what we were doing last year was pretty competitive and if not good enough to win most games. We’ve reviewed our season and we look at a couple of key offensive and defensive parameters and we were actually first and second in those. Scores and scores against, which is a pretty good indicator that we’re doing a lot right. We’re just lacking that in some games, and that was costly in the end and when you miss that Top 4 spot we then sort of needed everything to go right and it didn’t in that Elimination Final so we don’t think we’ll change too much drastically, but we’re always likely to be on the ball and I’ve noticed that over the pre-season and we’ve had a really fast mode when we need to and it’s exciting and its good to be a part of and as a foreword that’s something that I hope we can keep doing because when we do it well, it’s a good way to play.

GH: Now I hope you consume enough footy media to know that there was a big expose about what happened pre the final last year with the Bulldogs. There was a big discussion between the coach and some of your group as to whether Jamarra plays or not. Did that, in your mind, did it upset preparations? Did it send a wave of discontent amongst the playing group or not?

CW: No I was completely unaware of that at the time, which is probably a good thing. But yeah, I think that’s part of the reason I try not to consume too much. You gotta go into games feeling confident and focused on what you’ve got to execute and that can be hard enough at times, so nah I wasn’t aware of that so yeah I suppose to answer your question it didn't have an effect.

KC: We’ve got about 30 seconds before we’re going to unfortunately run out of time. What do you need to see from him because Luke Bewveriudg has said ‘the players will come to me when they think he’s ready to play’. What do you need to see from him before you know he’s ready to go?

CW: Look, Marra’s been at the club, he’s brought an energy, looks revived a little bit lately which has been great to see him in there and obviously that’s a big starring point. We need to obviously have him at the club and we just kinda look out for ‘Marra as a person. That’s sort of our main priority as a club at the moment, football definitely comes second to that. We just want him to be happy and feeling healthy and that’s when the football stuff com into discussion. But for now we just want to get around him as much as we can and when he comes to training that's making it a lot easier.