
GRAPHIC CONTENT WARNING: AFL star Sam Butler posts stomach-churning photo of horrific injury that has kept him off the field for 418 days
Butler, 22, broke both his fibula and tibia in a game for VFL side Box Hill on April 28 last year in horrific scenes.
Adding to the drama was Butler then having to wait half an hour for an ambulance to arrive and take him to hospital.
A few niggles late in the pre-season delayed the youngster's start to 2025, but he has been recalled by Hawks coach Sam Mitchell to play the Western Bulldogs in a blockbuster at Marvel Stadium in Melbourne on Thursday night.
Butler, who has displayed his versatility by playing in the midfield for Box Hill in recent weeks, will look to help the Hawks avoid a fourth successive defeat.
Concerningly, they were hammered by premiership favourites Collingwood and the Brisbane Lions in their last two outings.
Mitchell has outlined what he desperately wants to see from his players more than any other against the Bulldogs.
'I just think it's pressure,' the coach said.
The Hawks were outclassed in the tackle counts against the Magpies and Lions, with the numbers - 82-38 and 59-36 - painting a grim picture.
'The winning tackle count is often not the winning team, but you can't get beaten the way we have been,' Mitchell added.
'Enabling the players to be able to put pressure on the opposition is going to be the most important thing for us.'
Meanwhile, Luke Beveridge's Bulldogs are bracing themselves for a fierce attack on the contest from a desperate Hawthorn side.
'You're always wary when a club's been under the microscope a bit and the way they galvanise and prepare for their next game,' he said.
'We've got to be ready for their intensity in this game, because it might be more explosive than what you're sometimes used to.
'That's our challenge in the bigger part of the platform to springboard into the back half of the year off a really good experience.
'It's a really critical game for both clubs.'

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23 minutes ago
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The British and Irish Lions are more professional than ever with a backroom staff completely incomparable to tours of past eras. Telegraph Sport was given exclusive access to three key figures in the Lions ' push for a series win against Australia this weekend. The head of performance Aled Walters, the Lions head of performance, has tailored the conditioning programme to ensure that the players are able to peak in the second Test in Melbourne with the opportunity to clinch the series. 'It's a different challenge to, for example, a World Cup, isn't it?,' explained Walters. 'Because there you get a block of time beforehand. Now it's a bit different. The players have had nine months of rugby. The biggest thing is for our conversations to be very individual-specific throughout, and it's not a blanket approach. 'Then you throw in on top something I haven't experienced before, which is the potential to be starting a game on Saturday, on the bench on Wednesday, and potentially starting the game again on Saturday. 'Our planning has to be so flexible and fluid around this and making good choices. I know we've said it a few times already – having conversations with players.' Walters highlighted the workload of Bath and Scotland fly-half Finn Russell as an example of how the Lions had adapted their training loads. 'It's well documented that Finn's played a lot of rugby this year, hasn't he?' added Walters. 'Are we expecting him to play his best rugby on tour? One hundred per cent we are. So how do we get him there? How does he go into the biggest games for him feeling mentally engaged, feeling fresh, feeling at his best? And it'll matter at different times for every player. 'It would be unfair to go, 'Ah, but that's a midweek game, that's fine'. 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For Walters, his relationship with head coach Andy Farrell has been key. He opted to join the Ireland set-up last year from England. 'The most important relationship I've got on tour is Andy and making sure the training is appropriate. And I understand what he needs from a rugby point of view but he also recognises that if I say, 'We need this today or we need it at this level' we can adapt. 'We have to have that conversation and relationship that he trusts, if I say 'We need to nudge it now, we need to push here, or now we have to pull back'.' The analyst Vinny Hammond is the man you see sitting beside Andy Farrell in the coaches' box with his head often buried in a laptop. The former player and coach at University College Dublin is a veteran of the previous two Lions tours and has been working with the IRFU since 2008. Fascinatingly, he worked for Joe Schmidt, the Wallabies head coach, when he was with Ireland, and now Farrell, so has an insight into both head coaches. 'One of the first things I did was make sure we had an absolute of four analysts for seven coaches,' Hammond said. 'We appointed Rhodri Bown, from the Welsh Rugby Union, Carwyn Morgan, from the RFU and John Buckley, who works with me at the IRFU. John has managed what we need to do, day-to-day. 'My job is trying to take the stress away from Andy and just have something ready to go when he needs it, and understanding how difficult the head job of the Lions really is, because whatever [you might think] about being a head job in a country, this is another level of scrutiny. 'The biggest thing between any of us is just that trust. If I say something to him or he says something to me, it's coming from a place that we're trying to do something for the betterment of the result. 'In the game, it could be as simple as checking where a winger is standing on a kick-off or as detailed as some of the stats that we track live. But often it's very simple things that you think are small, but maybe in the bigger scale of the game, are big moments, and you're just trying to take one little bit away from him that he doesn't need to worry about.' Hammond describes the technology at a game as similar to that of stock traders. 'The set-up involved now for a match day is similar to a small trading desk in that we're taking six to eight angles of the game live into the coaches box,' he adds. 'That used to be one, then it went to two, four, and now it's somewhere between six and eight for every one of those angles. Then you've got eight in the coaches' box, eight people on laptops, so that's 64 video streams. 'For all of that to work, the infrastructure in behind it needs to be very robust and very strong. 'It is not life or death, but it is pretty important at the time. In one of the games, the referee's audio coming into the coaches' box started to drop and Johnny [Buckley] is on the sideline trying to patch that up mid-game. So you're fixing the aeroplane while the aeroplane's flying, and it's quite an adrenalin rush.' As Farrell's right-hand man in the box, he insisted that data is not overbearing during games. 'I think people have this idea that there's some data set driving substitutions. The data makes up maybe one seat in the coaches' box, which would give it 1/9 of an input. 'You are trying to second guess what's coming, for example, how effective we are in the air. I need to make sure those clips are ready if Andy wants to go back and check and ask: 'Who was there, who was standing where?' Trying to find the mark where you need to get to is the adrenalin rush for me. That's why I love doing match day more than anything else. 'Sometimes Andy will want to show a video clip we'll have to get ready. Sometimes it'll be a simple message. Sometimes he will use a screen. Sometimes it's a flip-chart. Sometimes he uses nothing. It is about having all of those things ready to go. 'You want to work for someone you would go through a wall for, and with Andy you would go straight through the wall. You probably wouldn't make as big a dent as he would.' Analysis of training is also unique to this tour. 'One of the big changes Andy made was we reduced meetings to an absolute minimum now, and everything that we do is on the pitch,' adds Hammond. 'So we've had to hire a 20-foot screen for every training session on wheels and drive in our truck so that we do a lot of the meetings in the session. 'For example, if John Forgarty is doing a scrummage session, there is the chance to review each scrum on a big screen, rather than go back to the hotel and then hold a review session. Our philosophy is 'fix it on the go'.' And what about analysing the Wallabies? 'The midweek games were a disaster because we knew each of them had a couple of months to prepare for the game, so what they did in Super Rugby did not translate to what they did against the Lions,' adds Hammond. 'When you are dealing with a coach like Joe [Schmidt, the Wallabies head coach], who I worked with all the time he was in Ireland, and Andy, you are dealing with two of the best coaches in the world in the last quarter of a century, head to head. 'I know that Joe is spending every minute trying to fix what happened last weekend, and Faz is spending every minute of his day trying to make sure we finish the series on Saturday. 'There is a package on every Australian player that the boys have access to. It will be the same in the Wallabies camp. For me, what I have come to understand is that most of the stuff we think is important, only five per cent is actually retainable. 'It might be [that] we want the players to remember one thing that an opposition player does, as opposed to 10 things that the player does. Every time we add a bullet point to a player's profile it dilutes it. For one player, the key point might be a one-foot step. So all week we might just want the players to think about a left-foot side step that might be coming. 'If we can get a player coming to us and saying I want to know more, we know they will retain more of the information. Bundee Aki is a great example, on the night before a game he sits on the end of my bed and asks to watch his opposite number and maybe a couple of players around him and he will be calling the clips that he wants to see, as opposed to me giving them to him.' The nutritionist Professor Graeme Close is the Lions' head of nutrition. His job has been to ensure that the Lions players are fuelled properly and ready for action. ' A few years ago, we started this project doing biopsies on rugby players before and after a game. You can take a little muscle biopsy and you can directly measure how much carbohydrate a rugby player uses in a game,' said Close. 'So you take a small anaesthetic into the leg and then a small incision with a needle. Then you take out something that is about the size of a grain of rice but then what we do is look at how much carbohydrate is in that before and after a game. Then we can see what percentage of carbohydrate [has been] used so then you can work out if a rugby player uses so much carbohydrate during a game. 'We know precisely then what the energy expenditure of a rugby player is so, based on that, we will design diets here to fulfil the energy demands of a game. The advice we are getting has gone from laboratory to playing field, which is probably the most fun part of the overall job. 'There are two things we need to do: one, make sure that muscle is loaded and then making sure we give them top-ups, post warm-up, at half-time and with some players try to get a top-up at the 60-minute mark. That's a challenge in rugby because there are no obvious designated stops. What you are trying to do at the next stoppage in play can get that to that player, so each different player will have a different in-game fuel implant.' One thing that the players will consume during the game is a 'liquid energy shot' when they are able to consume water. 'There are certain players who cover huge areas at high speeds and what we know is they are the ones who will rip through their energy stores quickest when they are doing high-speed energy running,' said Close. 'What we know is that if we fully load the muscle with carbohydrate we have got enough fuel for 60-70 minutes of exercise. That's all at high intensity. We have enough fat stores to run all day but you can't run high intensity off fat stores. No matter how much you fill the muscle at 60-70 minutes it is going to start getting low. That's why we look to give a top-up at half-time and then give another little top up around the 60-minute mark. 'You might see when the water bottles come on. We have three different bottles: we have straight water, you have water with electrolytes and then we will have a sports drink, water with carbohydrates. The fans see the water bottles going on. If they have eagle eyes they might see what differentiates the bottles and what gels the guys are handing out, which is not on a random basis. The guys will pick whatever bottle they want but they will be handed a specific gel.' In order to ensure that the players are in peak condition for match day, Close will ensure they consume a high amount of carbohydrates on the day before the Test match. 'Breakfast is always pretty standard but it is usually porridge and we might have a porridge of the day,' added Close. 'We will try to make that porridge really tempting with white chocolate and cranberry. It is a good way of adding extra carbs. Then at lunch there would be lots of pasta options. Then dinner is always a live pasta bar. 'We have an unbelievable chef here, Carl, who is one of the greatest sports chefs in the world. On game day minus one there was a famous chocolate bar called a 'Lion bar' but we have a Lions bar so we are working with Karl to develop a nice little midday snack. It's chocolate, wafer, nuts. It is a treat bar, but there are a couple of extra purposes. View this post on Instagram A post shared by The British & Irish Lions (@britishandirishlions) 'There's only so much of the healthy carbohydrates that the gut can handle in one day. You can't just load with brown rice and pasta. We are trying to get up to around 6g of carbohydrate per kg of bodyweight that day. If I have a 120kg player that's 720g of carbohydrate I am trying to get into him on that day. To try to do that in starchy, fibrous carbohydrates is going to cause some issues. 'Saturday is all about getting the breakfast right and then the pre-match meal might just be some fruit and yogurt or a smoothie. What you often find is that players do not have an appetite as we get near. If we get it right the day before then it does not really matter.'