The night after he injured his knee last year, Matthew Flynn’s phone rang. The young ruckman was home at the time, hanging out with his housemates, feeling sorry that his season was suddenly over and that he was in for a long, long time on the sidelines. On the other end of the line was Callan Ward, a few months into his own knee rehabilitation program, calling from Melbourne Airport. ‘I’m about to get on a plane and come home,’ Ward told Flynn. ‘And when I get home, I’m coming straight over to your place.’

Flynn hasn’t forgotten the gesture. “I can’t remember why he was in Melbourne, but he called me up and told me he was coming around as soon as he landed,” he said. “He said, ‘I’m leaving right now and I’m coming to see you.’ And for him to show that care, I don’t think it would surprise many people because everybody knows that’s exactly what he’s like.

“But for me on that night, it meant a lot to have the captain be thinking of me. I’d been trying not to think too much about how hard it was going to be and how long it was going to be, just trying to relax a bit, and he helped me. He came around straight away, he had Aidan Corr with him, and I just remember thinking 'how good is this? That he made this effort for me?”

On Sunday, Ward will play his first game in more than a year. His teammates can’t wait. “You should see him at training,” said Corr. “He’ll go back with the flight of the ball and take a sick mark, and then hit someone with the kick and we’re all thinking the same thing: ‘ah, there he is, he’s back.’ We haven’t forgotten. We just haven’t seen it in a long, long time.” Stephen Coniglio can see it, too. “We’re all excited,” he said. “He’s looking the goods.”

Coniglio, Corr and everyone else at the GIANTS knew what Ward was like before he went down against Geelong in April last year. Coniglio sat by his side on the bench straight after it happened, consoling him. The GIANTS won in Geelong for the first time that day and it was the first time Coniglio could remember “genuinely playing for someone, playing with their spirit. It was just a sick feeling, watching it happen and seeing someone you care for in so much distress.”

Ward’s wife Ruby knew him well too, of course. She had the game on at home while she was working, noticing a GIANTS player fall from the corner of her eye and realising as the replay started and her phone began ringing that it was Cal. She had watched him navigate all sorts of ups and downs throughout his career – injuries, losses and the decision to move to Sydney, for starters - but one thing they had had never experienced together was a major, long-term injury.

It took Ward a couple of weeks to make it back to Sydney after he was hurt – he stayed in Melbourne for surgery and waited there for his sister to have her first baby, who ended up arriving 11 days late – but when he got home they had a long chat about how he wanted and intended to handle all the things about to come his way, without really knowing what they would be.

“It was going to be such a long time out and that was something he wasn’t used to, so we kind of had to figure out what he was going to be like and how he would react to it all,” Ruby said. “Some of it he had to figure out as we went along and, in some ways, he couldn’t know what to expect of himself. He’s always had a big heart, but what I saw from the start was the perspective he had.

“He knew it wasn’t the worst thing in the world. And he was so grateful to all the people who reached out to him and was really humbled that they cared. He was a new person in some ways. He thought he’d be down in the dumps, and of course he had some days and some weeks where it was tough, but I think he surprised himself. He had one day at home when he got back to Sydney and then the next day he was in at the club, looking for things to do.”

Ward stayed connected to the group, in the beginning and right the way through, even as it became clear that he could miss out on something special. Simon Harries, the rehab coach, was new to the club but couldn’t help but notice his ability to stay involved and make others feel the same way when being in the rehab group demands a certain selfishness and can be a really easy place to hide away and become a bit invisible.

“You actually want guys to be a bit selfish and prioritise what’s best for them on a day to day basis so that they can get better each day, each week and come back as quickly as they can,” Harries said. “He was able to do that without isolating himself from the group and it wasn’t forced, I think it was really genuine. And because he did it, others did it too. It was almost like whoever came into rehab, he dragged them in and dragged them along with him.”

In the car on their way to and from the club most days, Corr found out how deep Ward’s optimism really ran. “He had some tough times in there where things were going slowly for him, but he was always smiling,” he said. “That’s what I didn’t really know about him, that optimistic side. I just saw how he makes the best out of most things. It was never, ‘I don’t feel like this today,’ it was always ‘let’s get this done.’ You hear some people talk about perspective and it can sound like a cliché, but with him he just speaks from the heart, I think.”

It was the same before the grand final and straight after it. Ward called Coniglio the night after he ruled himself out of the game and went to have dinner with him and Jon Patton. “It was a bittersweet day for him as much as it was for me, but he was more worried about me that day,” Coniglio said. After the game, he was so supportive that it felt to Corr like he had been out there with them, playing in the loss. Ruby never saw him waver around home, either.

“I always said, I can’t imagine how hard this must be. I expected at some point he would break and say, ‘yep, it really is’,” she said. “But so many times he said to me, ‘if the boys win this year, they’ll have a hunger to win again next year.’ There was never a moment where he said, ‘I don’t know if I want it to happen this year, I want it to be next year.’ And I’m sure if I played footy, I would have been thinking ‘no, wait for me!’ But he just kept talking about this hunger and if they did it once they’d do it again, that’s the type of boys they have at the club.”

There were some silver linings along the way. A trip to Greece for a friend’s wedding in the middle of winter. Finding out his baby boy, Romeo was on the way: Ruby and Callan shared that secret for five months. Even the fact that Coniglio was there to console him on the day he went down was a positive. “He thinks so highly of Cogs,” Ruby said. “He has photos of Cogs up in our wardrobe, just placed randomly, I see them all the time. So, it was nice that Cogs was playing and was there with him at that time. I know that would have been helpful for Cal.”

Coaching was another one. Ruby had never really seen it appeal to him before he was forced to find other things to do around the club, “and he came home happy, talking about the things he was helping the coaches do, he loved it so much.” In rehab with him, Flynn found himself watching, learning and wanting to keep up. “He made me want to do things right,” he said. “He was like my bunny; he was out in front and I kept trying to chase him down. He was so positive with me, he kept reinforcing that I was going well, and he just always saw the light.”

Training with him during the shutdown period, Corr remembered how much he hates missing a kick, making a mistake or letting Ward down. “I was even doing all his little knee warmups with him,” he said. “My knees have never been better. He does every single thing to a tee and when you train with him, you train better, you can’t help it.”

He’s noticed his influence more recently, too, back out on the track. “I’ve been watching him and at every break, every stop in play, he has Jacko Hately picking his brains, and Xavier O’Halloran, and Jye Caldwell,” Corr said. “I said to him, ‘you’re doing a fair bit of coaching out there,’ and he said, ‘It’s just the best, these boys are so into it, they all just want to learn and they’re listening to me.’ And I just thought, wow. I never saw Wardy as being a coach after footy but seeing him do it and listening to how much he loves it, there could be something there for him. The boys just want to get better and they’re smart enough to go straight to him.”

Being without Ward – on that day in Geelong and for so long since – has demanded new things of his teammates. “For eight years we were used to him being the one to help us out of trouble,” said Coniglio. “He’s done it countless, countless, countless times in our existence, and as much as we missed him, not having him made us work out how to do it and almost repay him for those times. That was the positive side to not having him, but we want him back out there, for sure.”

Corr feels the same and is just as happy to have him back. “I think it was huge for us to do what we did without him last year because we’d relied on him so many times to be the one to get things rolling when we were struggling. He’s the one who’s always ‘what is going on here,’ and been the one to get things going,” he said. 

“But it’s going to be better with him there. I see him as the missing ingredient. I feel like some people might have forgotten how good he is just because he hasn’t been there for so long, and he’s a serious player. He’s so good. We want him there and we want him to be a part of it and I think he knows that. And I hope he hasn’t forgotten how good he is. He’s going to help make us better.”