Myers says he's not stressed about how few games he's played in almost 10 years with Essendon. Credit:Joe Armao Like his suspended teammates, Myers, though fit and able, didn't get to play a single game in 2016. Unlike them, however, his game time in 2015 didn't amount to a whole lot more than this year. One half plus 10 minutes, to be precise. After heading into a new year full of energy, 2015 for him was over when it had barely begun, Myers crunching and dislocating his shoulder five minutes into round one against Sydney. He didn't return until round 20 against Adelaide. That Saturday afternoon, he lasted until five minutes into the second half, when he was kneed in the back, a fracture the result, his season over. It also happened to be the day an Essendon team and club that had been just hanging on completely fell apart, thrashed by 112 points, coach James Hird resigning less than 48 hours later.

For Myers, that was the low point of the last four draining years. And why, perversely, what has come since has been almost a stroke of fortune. "It sounds weird, but I had quite a fun year this year on a lot of fronts," he tells Fairfax Media on Wednesday, just a week and a half after being permitted to train with the club once again. "Mentally, I was pretty worn out by that point. I think it was a blessing in disguise to have this year to get away from football. "I didn't watch a lot of it. I watched a couple of games early in the season and just found it really difficult to sit there and watch, particularly when Essendon was playing, so instead I just tried to do as much as I could that I wouldn't ordinarily have been able to do had I been playing." Myers knocked over a major chunk of the commerce degree he'd been chipping away at part-time for years. He visited a friend in Hong Kong. He went back to see his family in Perth several times. And he spent a month in Europe with his girlfriend, a few days in London, a few with some other suspended teammates in Croatia, and the bulk of it touring Italy's coastline, finishing up on Lake Como and the Amalfi coast. He returned to pick up his training program not only physically refreshed, but a far cry psychologically from the dispirited man of late 2015.

"I'd had a tough year with injury, obviously the club was struggling with the WADA appeal pending, and as the club delegate to the AFL Players' Association and as part of our leadership group I took on more of a role in meetings with lawyers and that stuff, because I wasn't playing and was trying to give some of the other guys a chop-out. I think it all sort of caught up with me and I fell in a hole. "That was probably the hardest time for me. Even after the CAS decision [in January this year], my worst moments were that last half of the year before." Myers, who has been given a new three-year contract, also thinks he has returned with a greater sense of perspective on being a professional sportsman. "It's a pretty all-encompassing job nowadays, there's restrictions and monitoring of every aspect of your life, be it diet or what you do with your social time, and I think guys can sometimes get caught up in that bubble and can get quite negative and lose perspective of how lucky you are to be doing what you're doing. "We're pretty lucky. There's people that lose their jobs all the time and they don't get paid, they've got a mortgage and kids and are asking 'What do we do now?' So I haven't [during the suspension] for one second thought we've had it any worse than a lot of other people.

"With the support of people around me I've been able to get to a point where all I am is proud and grateful for what I have. You don't get there by yourself, I've had a lot of help to get back there, but it's a pretty good spot to be in." Not that 2016 has been one big holiday by any stretch. Alongside the other suspended Bombers, Myers has been working hard on the track under the tuition of former Bombers player and assistant coach Sean Wellman and former Collingwood and Carlton fitness man David Buttifant. At times that group has comprised up to a dozen players. Other occasions, when some of their number have been unavailable or away, there's been as few as three. But Myers says the training has been intense and varied. "It was probably a challenge to keep us all motivated all the time, but 'Butters' has got a really good outlook on life, and he was good to chat to about a lot stuff. He was almost like a therapist for a few of us at times," he says. Myers concedes the program was never going to replicate completely the more game-like elements of training, in which those teammates who weren't suspended were participating, not to mention an actual game to play every week.

But he's not too worried about picking up the tempo once again. After all, he smiles ruefully, coming back from long spells on the sidelines is "something I'm well versed in". Next year will be his 10th with the club. His games tally remains just 85. Only three times in his nine seasons has he broken double figures. Early on it was soft tissue problems, then a merry-go-round of different fitness staff offering different remedies. Lately, it has been impact injuries. Myers was making notes recently for a talk he was to give at his old secondary school in Perth. As he was doing so, he worked out that in just the past five years, he'd played only 60-odd of more than 120 games, and in the process had seven different bouts of surgery. But making up for lost time, even at the age of 27, isn't necessarily a motivating force. "I don't get stressed about how much footy I've missed. There's no point living in that state where you're constantly thinking about how many games you've missed or that the guys you were drafted with have played 'X' amount. I just focus on getting as healthy as I can. And, really, in a life sense, I still count myself incredibly lucky." That sunk in again the day Myers was allowed to set foot back inside the Essendon Football Club, spending hours just catching up with people he hadn't been allowed to mix with for eight months.

"It was like going home again," he smiles. And for the first time in years, going home without a black cloud hanging over him. "I'm just excited. We probably underestimated just how much this whole thing weighed on our subconscious, how it was always there and there was always some date down the track that you were dreading. Loading "Now there really is nothing more on the horizon, and you're just happy and can see what the actual football future looks like, you just go, 'Oh yeah, this is how it's supposed to feel.' We just want to have a real crack now, without any excuses or anything preventing us from having a real go. "It's all on us now. And as a player, that's all you want."