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Turner milestone rewards long road back

Neale HarveyKalgoorlie Miner
Mines Rovers’ Sam Turner will play his 150th Goldfields Football League match on Sunday.
Camera IconMines Rovers’ Sam Turner will play his 150th Goldfields Football League match on Sunday. Credit: Amber Lilley/Kalgoorlie Miner

Sam Turner’s 150-game milestone for Mines Rovers against Railways on Sunday in the Goldfields Football League occurs three years after a serious knee injury threatened his career.

A premiership player in 2015 and 2018, Turner’s road back to senior football was long and frustrating but, at 29, he’s hopeful that with “three or four years left” 200 games is a realistic goal.

Father Time, however, is slowly but surely kicking in and with a big focus on his 16-month-old daughter, Turner said it was getting harder to meet the demands of league football.

“I did my ACL in 2019 and it was hard to come back from — mainly due to the frustration of not playing and then COVID, so I actually didn’t play for two years,” he said.

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“I’m a lot sorer than I used to be after games.

“But it’s not even the body so much because I have a baby daughter now and it just gets harder to commit to all of the footy stuff.”

Turner’s 2012 debut against Railways was marred by a big loss.

But he was among a core group of emerging youngsters who would form the backbone of the Diorites’ senior team for the next decade.

“I was still a colt then and we probably had seven (colts) in the team,” Turner said.

“Railways were at the peak of their powers and smashed us by about 84 points.

“It was a tough initiation, but guys like myself, Jordan (Delbridge), Cale (Delbridge) and Matt Braham were only 19 or so and all playing in the same team.

“I always thought that playing 150 (games) wouldn’t be a problem because I wasn’t going anywhere, I’d play for a long time and didn’t even think about it.

“But as I’ve found out in the past few years, it (the 150-game milestone) is actually really hard to reach.”

After his knee injury, Turner said his mindset was always to play again.

But it proved more challenging than he had expected.

“I remember thinking that if I ever had a major injury again, I’d retire because the rehab was horrible,” Turner said.

“I had the surgery in the middle of 2019, you can’t walk and then September comes, the team gets knocked out of the finals and I’ve already done three months of rehab.

“The realisation set in that I still had nine months to go and for six months of it, I’d be on my own away from the footy club.

“That was pretty deflating.”

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