ED Murphy last donned the red and green as a boy, now the former Mungindi Grasshopper is looking to make the colours his again.
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Not because it’s Christmas and he’s back on the family farm, but because he’s been signed by reigning NRL premiers, the Rabbitohs.
Unfortunately, just as he’s entered the biggest stage of his career, the 22-year-old’s had that age-old expression of good luck come literally true. Murphy’s broken a leg – or close enough anyway.
Murphy was only in his second week training with his new South Sydney teammates when he fractured his foot. He’ll now spend three frustrating months before he’ll be able to vie for a spot in the NRL’s team to beat.
“It’s a fair bit worse than what I thought it would be,” Murphy said on Friday, the morning after he went under the knife. “It’s called a Jones fracture. It’s a stress fracture so it can be recurring and take’s a while to heal. So this operation was to put a plate on there and screw it together to make sure it heals properly and doesn’t break again.”
The injury happened at a 36-hour pre-season boot camp run by Army commandos at the Holsworthy barracks.
“It’s pretty full on,” Murphy said. “We probably only had two hours’ sleep the whole 36 hours. We rocked up the Thursday night, trained right through until three or four in the morning Friday, then we had an hour’s sleep and got back into it.”
The training sounds like it’s taken straight from the script of ‘Full Metal Jacket’ – “four or five hour PT sessions, tyres, army crawls, burpees, boxing, a lot of obstacle courses, that sort of team bonding stuff.”
But even a fractured foot did not exempt Murphy from his boot camp duties, designed to be both physically and mentally gruelling. After his Friday night injury Murphy took part in one of the last exercises: sorting out brown and white rice grains for six long hours until 4am.
“They had a big esky full of brown and white rice and all 25 of us had to sort out the grains whilst ACDC’s ‘Shook Me All Night Long’ was on repeat,” Murphy said. “We probably listened to that song about a 100 times.
“I went through phases of enjoying it and then being sick of it... but it’s still a good song.”
The injury couldn’t have come at a worse time for Murphy, who was just signed after being released from the team South Sydney beat in the grand final, the Canterbury Bulldogs.
Despite not being able to crack the first grade team with the Doggies, openings in the squad and a positive relationship with coach Michael Maguire at the Rabbitohs meant an NRL debut was on the cards for the kid from Mungindi.
“With a couple of blokes leaving, like Lote Tuqiri retiring and Kirisome Auva’a with his suspension then having a few older blokes, like Joel Reddy and Bryson Goodwin, it was looking pretty good,” he said.
But despite the bad timing of his injury, Murphy remained upbeat.
“When I signed for one year, back in October, a couple of weeks after they won the grand final, there were a few conditions,” he said. “I needed to prove myself in the off season and in the trial games in order to continue on in the fulltime squad. The injury threw that out but I spoke to [coach] ‘Mag’ and he’s still keen to give me an opportunity. They’ve also got the smallest roster in the NRL so I’m in with a better opportunity there.”
Murphy said the early prognosis was that in eight weeks he’d be jogging and another four weeks until he could play footy again.
The foot fracture signed off on a tumultuous year for Murphy, who had his jaw broken by a late elbow at the end of the playing season for the Doggies’ reserves.
“It was probably the worst thing that’s ever happened to me, having to go through that,” he said. “Seven weeks on a liquid diet – it was pretty horrible. I’ve never really had injuries before that have kept me from playing footy, no broken bones or anything like that; Then I get two in the space of months…”
After touching down in Moree yesterday morning, Murphy is looking forward to a relaxing Christmas at the family farm in Mungindi. The foot cast might even mean his dad, Shane – himself a premiership winner and best and fairest for the Boars – gives Ed a break from the lamb marking and paddock work he normally “saves up” for his boy’s visits.
The family runs 20,000 head of sheep, as well as a cattle and some broadacre farming and Murphy, who studies agricultural science, said eventually he’d come back to work the land.
For now he’s focused on recuperation and making the most of the red and green season. “We play backyard cricket... a lot of cricket. If it gets too hot we watch the Boxing Day test, usually play golf on Boxing Day,” he said. “But I think mainly I’ll just be sitting on the river doing some fishing and relaxing with the family.”