Lachie Ash drove home to Katandra on the day football stopped, and by the time he got there he wasn’t really sure what to make of everything that had just happened. On the one hand, he had just finished his first-ever AFL pre-season. He wasn’t sure what a normal year felt like, so he didn’t know what it was to be missing out on one. On the other hand, he had no idea when games would be back, or if they would come back at all, and he really wanted them to.

His dad had some good advice for him. “I got home, and Mum said, ‘how does it feel to be back?’ I said, ‘I’d rather be playing footy,’ and the first thing Dad said was, ‘well, you won’t be playing for a while so the sooner you get your head around that and start adjusting to that the better you’ll be,” Ash said. “That was a good thing to hear first up. Rather than sulking about it I sort of moved on and tried to be as positive as I could with my training. Looking back, it was the best thing he could have said to me because it just got me into the right mindset.”

It wasn’t always easy. When he first got back home Ash felt as though he’d been away on a long footy camp and was simply going back to how his life always had been. He got straight to work on the family farm and orchard, helping out with the end of fruit season, “which is kind of like the finals,” and doing all sorts of other chores. There were days and even weeks where he saw no-one but his parents, brother, sister and the old teammates he did some of his training with, “so it was almost the perfect place to isolate, having so much to do and not having to be stuck inside.” And having sent him off after the draft just a few months earlier, his family was happy to have him back.

Mostly, that is. “My brother wasn’t happy. He was going to move into my room the next week,” Ash said. “He didn’t get around to it before school started and then I showed up again, so he wasn’t too happy with me. And I think the grocery bill went up a fair bit. But it was good to be home. We were saying a couple of nights before I left, it could be the longest amount of time I spend back at home again. Who knows? So, I was trying to enjoy that as much as I could.”

Training without knowing when the next game would be was something weird, and a challenge. To Ash the break felt like entering into a whole new pre-season, though he had new things he wanted to think about and work on getting better at. “In your first pre-season it’s kind of like every day you feel you’re improving in some way or at something. I was learning how to defend, getting better that. And I was used to always being picked and always being in the team so that competition you get coming into an AFL team, that was really good too. I was enjoying that side of it, fighting to get a game.

“I didn’t want to stop improving but it felt a bit weird at first, like we were training without a purpose, not knowing what the target was. Normally you know when the first game is, and that’s when everything sort of has to come together. I had to work out how to motivate myself and we all had to do that not knowing what the timeline would be. That was a big challenge for me.”

So was simply having no games of football in his life. Between work and training Ash filled his days up easily and they slipped by quickly enough. Once he got used to the fact he couldn’t play and found a way to manufacture more purpose in his training sessions, he was fine. But when the weekends rolled around and he couldn’t even sit on the coach and watch a game of footy, or head down to the local oval and see his old club play, he realised how much he really missed it.

“Towards the end I was training on Saturday mornings and then thinking, geez, I wouldn’t mind sitting back and watching a bit of footy. That was the first time that I really thought, I genuinely wish there was footy on,” he said. “I spent so much time getting used to the fact that I couldn’t play that I didn’t think about the rest of it. I missed playing the whole time, but I’d accepted the terms that I couldn’t and moved on with side of things. But then I just missed all of footy. It felt like the game had been swept off the earth and that made it feel a bit real.”

It’s almost back now. Ash got back to Sydney a couple of weeks before training started up again, reuniting with Tom Green and Jake Riccardi at the draftees’ Breakfast Point apartment. “I think isolation could be good for our cooking skills,” he said, “and our cleaning is coming along pretty well. We’d just got ourselves a good routine when everything got tipped on its head. We’d just got adjusted and then we were back home again, but we’ve come back up and adjusted well again. Everything is starting to feel like it was before we left, which is good.”

Adjust: it’s one of his new favourite words. He has no idea what will happen this, his very first AFL season, but wants to make sure he is ready to go, whatever comes his way and whenever it comes his way. “I knew there might be some people who did the work in the break and some who might not. So, I thought if I did it to the best of my ability, who knows, maybe I’d be able to push myself up and there could be a spot there,” he said. “If I did the bare minimum, that wasn’t enough. I wanted to come back in good shape and give myself the best chance to be picked, show that I was the one putting my hand up and that I’d been able to adjust well.

“I think the competition between us will be good, it’s almost going to be who wants it more and who does it best. That’s for us, and that’s for every team. That’s the last thing Dad said to me, whoever can adapt the best will end up coming out with the best results. That’s the main thing I’ll take out of this, it’s about adapting. Whichever club does it best will come out with more wins than losses, and whichever players do it well will end up with the best results.”