Collingwood will be without their skipper for Thursday’s ANZAC Day blockbuster, after Darcy Moore was ruled out with vertigo symptoms linked to an inner ear issue.
The news comes just a day after Moore said he was “feeling fine” and attributed his absence from training earlier in the week to a cold.
But on Wednesday, head coach Craig McRae confirmed the club would not be risking the defender as specialists work to determine the cause of his ongoing discomfort.
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Inner ear issue behind dramatic turnaround
“Darcy’s got a bit of an inner ear issue. We’re not sure exactly what it is,” McRae said. “He’s got a bit of vertigo symptoms at the moment. We’ve had scans, he’s probably off to see a specialist now to see what’s going on there, but he won’t play.”
Moore was involved in a heavy collision during Collingwood’s match against Brisbane last Thursday, where he was nudged into the path of teammate Jeremy Howe and copped a knee to the ear. Despite the blow splitting cartilage in his ear, McRae said Moore had passed concussion assessments and that the vertigo symptoms are unrelated.
“No, we’ve done the protocol a couple of times… there’s no issue there,” the coach insisted. “It’s just something that’s sort of lingered early in the week, and it’s not going away.”
McRae said Moore described the sensation as “coming on and going away”, and although the exact diagnosis is pending, the decision to pull him out was precautionary.
“It was a conversation of: ‘Can he train?’ And he couldn’t. So we’re not going to play him.”
Collingwood will now need to reshuffle its defensive setup, with options like Charlie Dean and Jakob Ryan in the frame to face Essendon tall Peter Wright. Vice-captains Nick Daicos or Brayden Maynard are likely to lead the side in Moore’s absence.