Star may have had last game for Roos

NORTH Melbourne forward Ben Brown won’t play again this season after knee surgery.

Brown (below) injured his knee against Geelong in Round 10.

He could yet be traded by North Melbourne as part of their off-season rebuild despite kicking the most goals of any player in the AFL from 2011-2019, including Jeremy Cameron and Lance Franklin.

Talks have stalled, with the Roos not ruling out a trade for a player who turns 28 in November.

“The swelling’s probably the thing that told us there is maybe something, whether it’s a little flap of cartilage that keeps annoying my knee whenever I try to run, which doesn’t take much to clean up in a surgery room, but it’s something that’s kept me pretty low (volume) in terms of my running,” Brown said.

“Overall I’m disappointed that I’m not going to be able to get back and play this year and help the guys hopefully get a couple of wins, but I think we’ve made the right call.

“We just wanted to give it a really good run at trying to come back this year because I’ve been really excited about getting back and hopefully playing a couple of games.

“We … had a couple of goes early on in that rehab block of some running and it probably didn’t go that well, so we gave it a couple more weeks off.

“I understand now in my chats with the physios and coaches and doctors in particular, that the risk is too high and the potential that I come back and even have a soft tissue injury or something unrelated is just too high at the moment, because I haven’t had that load over the last month or so.

“While it’s pretty disappointing, I think we’ve made the right call. I feel good about where we’re at now and we can just have the surgery and get into our rehab.”