Hart left the ground minutes before halftime and didn’t return after tightening up in the hamstring.
It was a disappointing early night for Hart, who had enjoyed a terrific patch of form and was well on the way to another big numbers game after collecting eight kicks and four handballs and inflicting plenty of damage before the injury.
“Shaun he tightened up in his hamstring and they (the medical staff) didn’t want him to come back on,” Lions coach Leigh Matthews said after the game.
Michael did not play after receiving a kick to the calf last week at Carlton.
“We are hoping he will only miss one week, but when you miss you have to prove you are okay the next week,” Matthews said.
Craig McRae and Brad Scott both left the field nursing sore heads at different stages tonight, but Matthews said neither had any problems in the lead-up to next Saturday’s Telstra Dome clash with St Kilda.
Scott returned to the field in the dying minutes, while McRae ran the game out strongly with a 13-possession second half.
“Craig McRae’s okay, he got a bloody nose but nothing more than that,” the coach said.
“Brad had some problem – he came back on at the end and could have come back on earlier, but he’s had a pretty heavy workload for most of the year, so we thought we’d give some match time to people who had missed a bit of senior footy.”
The Lions’ pre-match preparations hit a snag when a sprinkler burst in their warm up room, flooding it and sending the players to run around the downstairs corridors instead.
“The warm up room sprinkler system blew a top. It was flooded in about three to four inches of water. It didn’t affect us greatly, it wasn’t our changerooms fortunately,” Matthews said.
“You improvise and we did our warm-up in the corridor – it’s going to be a mess in there and a smelly mess I suspect. About quarter past five all of a sudden there was water pouring from one of the sprinkler heads.”
The fire brigade was called and the fire sprinkler system turned off, but a fountain of water continued to pour out.
Hoses and industrial fans were being used to dry out the area. Quick thinking conditioning staff plugged the doors to the gym and their offices to ensure there was no further damage.
