A few weeks before he injured his knee last year, Matthew Flynn was sitting outside Leon Cameron’s office with Dawson Simpson on the couch beside him. The GIANTS were playing Brisbane that week, Shane Mumford was out of the side and one of them was going to take his place. In a few minutes the coach was going to tell them together who he had picked, and why.

Flynn had wanted to play before. He had watched his friends, drafted with and after him, play their first games while he had kept waiting. He had falsely convinced himself a few times that he must surely be getting close. He had watched the club’s media team set up cameras before team meetings and let himself wonder: were they there for him, to record his debut being announced to the group? He had felt all sorts of things: jealous, impatient, nervous, like it may not ever happen. But this time he felt something that he hadn’t felt in three-and-a-bit seasons: deserving.

“I thought I was close before. But I look back and I wasn’t really, I just let my over-confidence get in the way and it wasn’t realistic. This time, I was playing some good footy. I felt like things were starting to come together for me. I was thinking, if I get a game now, I actually do deserve it,” said Flynn.

“I was sitting there with Daws, and we have a really close relationship. Before we went in he actually put his arm around me and said ‘whatever happens in there, I want you to play, you’ve grown so much and I’m so proud of you.’ He said, ‘I’ll be disappointed too, if it’s not me, but just know that I can see how hard you’re working and I really, really want you to play.

“We went in there, and it wasn’t me. And it was shattering. But I listened to what Leon said and to know Daws had that confidence in me as well was something that meant a lot to me. It made me think, keep going, keep doing what you’re doing. I wanted to get better, I didn’t want it to get me down. It was just: keep having fun, enjoy playing the game and everything will take care of itself. And then a few weeks later, what do I do? I go out there and do my knee.”

Flynn’s mantra – to enjoy himself – was something that had gotten him to that point. For a long time, watching his friends get games while he was still back in the NEAFL weighed on him, even though he knew there was only one spot for a ruckman and that as a young one he needed time to develop. He found himself worrying about getting that first game, and whether it was ever going to come. His inconsistencies – one encouraging week, two ordinary ones – confused him. And he found himself not enjoying the game like he had used to.

Last year that changed. “I started to think, ‘why was I consistent in my under-18 year with what I was doing and how I was playing. What’s changed?” he said. “Then I started to realise that back then I just loved to train and play on the weekend. I wasn’t thinking about getting picked or holding my spot in the team or why other players were getting picked ahead of me.

“I thought, ‘if I can get back to that way of thinking then I’ll definitely take some pressure off.’ So I did. I don’t want to hate football, I don’t want to wake up on a Saturday morning and think I don’t want to play because there’s all this pressure out there. I wanted to wake up and be excited about it. I wanted to think, ‘how good is this, I get to go and play footy today.”

The thought kept Flynn going after he did his knee late in the season, too. The night before his surgery in Melbourne, both Simpson and Mumford got picked in the same team. It made him wonder if that would have been him, but there was nothing he could do about it so he moved on from the thought. Then, on the four-hour drive to Narrandera two days after the operation, he had to remind himself that yes, he would be able to get through months and months of rehab.

“It was the worst trip of my life, the worst four hours ever,” he said. “Dad was driving and I was lying in the back seat and abusing him for going too fast over speed bumps or for going too slow. He couldn’t win. The drive just went forever and I was in agony, it was so much pain.

“I was whinging to Dad, saying ‘I never want to go through this again, if it happens again then I’m quitting.’ I didn’t want to even think about the rehab, there was so much going on in my mind. Of course that went away, but I think back to my first or second year and there is every chance I would have actually thrown in the towel. I don’t know how I would have done it. And that wasn’t even an option this time, it was never a serious thought at all, so I think I’ve built up a fair bit of resilience since then, which has helped me get through it.”

Still, there were some difficult times. At home, barely able to move for two weeks and still in pain, Flynn relied on his parents to bring him food, watched hour after hour of Netflix shows and kept waking up in the middle of the night wondering why this had happened to him. “It was the darkest time in my rehab, I’d say. I was almost having anxiety attacks, and I kept getting claustrophobic. That was a hard time, a weird time. Then when I was able to start moving around a bit, get to and from my own bed and start getting my own food, it started to get better. I just went a bit crazy for a bit. It wasn’t my idea of a good time at all.”

Back in Sydney, Flynn fed off the energy of the team as it made its way to September. The buzz around the clubs made getting through the initial part of his rehab program easy. He lives with Tim Taranto and Harry Himmelberg and it was impossible not to feel excited by all the good things coming their way, even though it encouraged a whole new series of ‘what ifs?”

“Because I’d felt so close I did have that thought: what if I had got in and managed to keep my spot and play finals?” he said. “I got a bit jealous at times there, but then I compared my situation to Callan Ward and Stephen Coniglio who both missed out and thought, ‘well shit, I could be out there but those two would definitely be, so imagine how they must be feeling.’

“I had to flip it, a bit. I thought, Harry and Tim and Harry Perryman could win a grand final here, and they’re three of my best mates, how special would that be? I took it away from me and focused on my mates because if they’d won a premiership it would have been amazing.”

Flynn’s rehab is right on track. He’s running more, running well and by the time the team gets back to train together – whenever that is – he expects to be very close to re-joining the group and playing again. But the timing of his reconstruction meant that he had to do a lot of his work during the players’ off-season break, as his teammates took off on holidays.

Starting it, he remembered a conversation he had once had with Phil Davis, in which Davis said one of the best things for a young player to experience was a rehab program, “because being forced to motivate and train by yourself teaches you good habits and makes you learn so much about yourself. I thought back to that and thought, ‘well this should be perfect for me.’ And I mapped out my program with the strength and conditioning staff and thought, ‘I’m going to handle this in a really professional manner and maybe I will surprise some people.”

He stuck it out. Even when the texts and Snapchats started arriving from Himmelberg, Taranto and others overseas and interstate, reminding him of where he wasn’t and what he had to do. “I’d have this moment of thinking, ‘I wish I was doing that, but then I kept going back to my motivation,” he said. “It was actually good because I had all this time to myself and October is a great time of the year to be in Sydney.

“I’d train in the morning and then have the whole day to myself to go to the beach, look around, just do something nice. We don’t get the chance to do that during the season, and when the season finishes we usually all take off. So I looked at it and thought, here’s my opportunity to have a holiday in Sydney. It was a good thing to do. So that kept me going, and I just set little goals along the way and it all kept me on track.”

Flynn hasn’t forgotten how close he was sitting outside Cameron’s office that day, either.  When he got injured, he didn’t want to stall, or stop improving, even though he wasn’t able to play for such a long time. The idea he had was to come back feeling even closer to a senior game than he was when he got hurt. Since then, Simpson has gone but Sam Jacobs has come in and Mumford has re-signed. Flynn knows that getting a game hasn’t got any easier but is confident that when he plays again he will be better, stronger, happier and determined to improve even more. 

“Even with Sauce coming in I look at it and think, ‘yeah, he’ll make it harder to get a game, but how good will it be to train with him and learn some things off him?” he said. “I’ve tried to have this mindset that, if I was so close to playing before I did my knee, imagine if I come out of this being a bit stronger, a better runner, with another year of experience that comes from watching games and whatnot. I was close 12 months ago so with another 12 months I should be closer. That’s the approach I’ve tried to take and it’s been good motivation for me.

“I guess I’m in a really good headspace right now. I’ve got through the hardest part of my rehab and as much as this next part is going to suck with no football for a while it’s made me miss footy even more. In a selfish way this has all happened at a good time for me because I wouldn’t be playing games. But I’m moving better than I ever have and I feel like I’ve pieced some more parts of my game together. Now I just want to play a few games and go from there.”