Jezza’s Journal: In his latest entry West Coast defender Jeremy McGovern discusses his broken thumb and what his first game from the stands at Optus Stadium was like

West Coast Eagles star Jeremy McGovern is keeping his home town Albany in the loop during this unprecedented AFL season. Read Jezza’s Journal every Thursday in the Advertiser. I’m not having a great run. I’ve broken my thumb, which kept me out of the game against Collingwood. Sometimes you have a bad run but it’s just footy. It was a quiet week as a result. I broke my thumb in the derby and found out on Monday. The options are to have surgery, rest it and not play, or play. We decided to rest it in a splint and try to play with it. I’m letting it settle down and was doing running but no ball work and left it until captains’ run on Saturday to test it out. It’s my right thumb, and affected too much of my game, my ball drop, marking and spoiling. It came down to how functional I was, and I wasn’t functional enough, and it was going to affect me too much so I came out and we had a couple of guys waiting in the wings in Josh Rotham and Harry Edwards who were ready to go. I went for a walk on Sunday morning and got a coffee with Madi and the kids. It was nice to finally be out and about, and then I went to the game at noon and watched the boys put on a clinic. We’ve been building into it and I was proud of the boys the way they played. We weren’t winning early and were not playing our type of footy but we’re building to our brand a bit more and you could see that on Sunday. It was good to see big Darcy Cameron out there — another North Albany boy. He got his opportunity and it worked out pretty well. He kicked a couple early but we still won the game. It was the first time I’ve ever watched a game at Optus Stadium. Jeez, it’s impressive from a spectator view. It’s a great stadium to sit in and I was in our players’ box with a couple of our development coaches and media personnel. Now our quarantine is over, I’ve got up to the shops and been on a couple of coffee runs. We can go fishing and play golf but just can’t sit down in restaurants or go places where big crowds congregate. I’ve got my business outside of footy to keep me busy and I’m keen on a hit of golf and a fish, but now I’ve broken my thumb that won’t be happening. We have entered a crazy time in this AFL season, with 20 days straight of footy. If someone told me this a year ago, I would have laughed at them. I think it will definitely be a positive thing for the fans. Injuries are the real concern, and you can see there has been a lot of them already. I hope everyone understands the risk the players are taking playing on these short turnarounds but we want to do it for the fans to keep the game going. We’ve got a good block of games coming up. We play Geelong this week into an eight-day break or bye, and then reasonable breaks between Carlton and Hawthorn. This season is so unpredictable, the pressure on teams is heightened even more. Three weeks ago, people were saying our season is stuffed and now all of a sudden we are being talked about as premiership favourites. It’s really tough news to hear that Francis Watson has done his ACL at training. Frankie is a huge talent that hasn’t got a big opportunity yet, mainly because of our backline. You don’t like seeing anyone do an ACL, but he’s a good kid and extremely unlucky to do one. I’m hoping to see Mum and Dad in the next few days, and once Mitch finishes his quarantine, hopefully we can get some time to catch up as well. My thumb will be a week-to-week prospect. After three weeks, the bone starts to get sticky and starts to heal, so it’s a balancing act, getting through games and making sure I don’t do any more damage. I’m not sure how many games I will play but I definitely give myself a chance this week. I’m not ruled out, but we won’t know if I’ll play until the day before.