JAMES Sicily rated Denver Grainger-Barras well before any of his Hawthorn teammates had laid eyes on the West Australian.

He trawled through vision, wrote reports and sat inside the war room at Waverley Park, peppering Hawks list boss Mark McKenzie with text messages until the club selected the key defender at pick No.6 in the 2020 NAB AFL Draft.

The 27-year-old did the same thing last year. This time with Sam Butler, even sitting in on his pre-draft zoom interview to probe the Victorian.

He loved his mannerisms, his temperament and his game, before the Hawks swooped on the brother of St Kilda star, Dan Butler, at pick No. 23 last November.

Sicily still thinks the club snagged a bargain. Time will tell how good he is at talent identification.

Sicily hasn’t played a game in 559 days, but the star defender hasn’t wasted too many days since his anterior cruciate ligament crumbled in the dying minutes against West Coast in August 2020, bringing his soaring career to a standstill.

Not long after Sicily had his right knee reconstructed, the Victorian returned to the club in a different capacity. Instead of preparing for the remainder of 2020, he spent the closing months of the year preparing for a different part of the business in a different part of the football department.

The Western Jets product combined his time last year between putting his body back together with the high performance team, working with the recruiters one day a week and working closely with assistant coach Chris Newman to add another string to his bow.

Now Sicily will return for his first game against Collingwood in Friday afternoon's practice match against Collingwood in Morwell a different person to the one we last saw hobbling off Optus Stadium 18 months ago.

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"It was frustrating not being able to play and missing so much time, but in saying that, I've learnt so much from watching," Sicily told AFL.com.au at Waverley Park earlier this week.

"I did some stuff in the coaching realm, sitting in the box, review, preview, so in terms of learning some more things about the game I think I've developed a lot more game sense to what I already had.

"I've found that I've started to love the game a little bit more.

"I'm very grateful and very fortunate to be in the position we're in, but it does feel like a job at times week to week, year to year, trying to be as consistent as you can.

"Although I would have loved playing, having the year off, I feel like it served me really well. I feel a lot more refreshed ready to go and it doesn’t feel like a job anymore."

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When Sicily last played he was widely regarded as one of the most damaging defenders in the game.

He had just been named in the All-Australian squad and was entering his prime before he tore his ACL.

But one silver lining of his time out of the game is he now knows what he wants to do when he eventually retires.

"I am very keen on list management; I think that’s where I want to go post footy. To be able to get that experience – what it looks like, what it feels like, how you actually do it, I've enjoyed that," he said.

"I'm in the middle to the back end of my career and I need to start thinking about that sort of stuff.

"The year off allowed me to do that. I'm interested in list management, recruiting and right now, I don't think I'll be a coach but there's parts of me that would say I may go down the coaching path.

"I don’t know why I'm so hesitant, but I feel like I could potentially down a coaching, development role.

"The coaching side is slowly growing on me. I'm pretty lucky that my foot is in the door and I'm getting access to all these great programs.

"Macca [Mark McKenzie] made sure there was structure to everything we did each week.

"It wasn’t just roll in and just tick a box, be a fly on the wall. He got me involved in Zoom meetings, coding, watching games, filling out the reports that they do and estimating where you think they will go in the draft.

"Are they draftable? Rookie? Top-10? First-round? Second-round? Try to look a bit deeper than the guys you know are going to go top-10. Try and find traits in guys that could potentially get to AFL standard, whether its speed, kicking, awareness.

"It's easier to pick the good players; it's harder to pick the guys in the fourth round."

Sicily will spend Tuesday afternoons working with McKenzie's list management team – Nathan Foley, Mitch Cashion and Geoff Morris – upstairs at Waverley Park.

But his focus is now back on chasing four premiership points each week, back playing for Newman, instead of sitting in the same coaches box as the former Richmond skipper.

"I've got a great relationship with 'Newy'," he said.

"When I ever think there's an area we can work on, he'll listen, and vice versa.

"We often both use each other as a sounding board for ideas. He's taught me a lot about the system and how we want to play.

"I'm just trying to piggyback him and get his message across to the players. I've got a lot of belief in the system him and Sam Mitchell are trying to implement."

It has a been a long road back for Sicily. Most knee reconstructions take 12 months to recover. Some take nine months. This has been double that. But mainly due to timing, rather than setbacks.

Sicily could have pushed to return for the last few games of last season, but the risk wasn’t worth the reward, given there was no September action. Now he is ready to go again.

"If we were going to play finals, I dare say my program would have been ramped up around the 10 to 11-month mark," he said.

"I had the conversation around the 9 to 10-month mark and said: let's not push it – I was still training hard – but in terms of the contact training and getting used to moving around people we delayed that.

"If we were pushing hard to get back I could have played the last three games but it probably wasn’t going to be worth it.

"Coming back in pre-season I was pulled out of a few things that were probably a little bit too competitive and match-play like.

"Since coming back after Christmas I've been pretty much 100 per cent. The confidence is there when I'm in the game.

"But in the prep – even the prep to training – I get little nerves and butterflies again, but I feel that serves me well because it gets me in a good frame of mind.

"I find I'm a little bit more energetic when I'm nervous, sometimes I can be a little bit lackadaisical and not start as well as I would like.

"Sometimes I need the first contest to get me going mentally. I've enjoyed having those nervous butterflies again."

Sicily has never been short of self-belief. He has the swagger of yesteryear, not quite Dermott Brereton, but not a world away either. It's why the five-time premiership great loves Sicily.

New senior coach Sam Mitchell, club psychologist Andrew Waterson and Newman have all helped rebuild his confidence ahead of a long-awaited return, focusing on the present rather than fretting about whether he can return to the same level he once performed.

One thing that will return, even in a reduced capacity, is the white line fever many associate with the Sicily brand.

It won't be to the level that saw him infamously tangle with former teammate Taylor Duryea or the feisty Easter Monday incident with Geelong captain Joel Selwood.

He feels he has grown up a bit, but some of the mongrel is what he needs to play his best football.

"There will still be elements of it, but you probably won't see it as much. I feel like I've matured a lot as a person," he said.

"Understanding that some parts of it is good but some parts of it isn’t good, whether it be optically people seeing it or also sometimes I can be really unapproachable by my own teammates when I'm in that frame of mind.

"For someone who is personally aspiring to be a leader, being unapproachable probably isn’t a good look or feeling to be projecting. There will be some blow-ups but not as many as in the past."

Sicily couldn’t be more different off the field than on it. He is softly spoken and considered.

It is why many inside Hawthorn believe he is misunderstood in the wider world. There was a feeling internally over the summer that Sicily would replace Ben McEvoy as captain, even despite missing so much football across the pandemic.

The Hawks have gone with the veteran ruckman again, but many believe it is only a matter of time before the man who wears his heart on his sleeve will eventually lead the famous brown and gold down the race and into battle every weekend.

"If you told me at the start of my career aspiring to even be a leader, I would have said: no way. I think spending time in the system, it's something that’s just progressed naturally without really forcing it from the leadership side of things," he said.

"I've still got to prove myself that I can actually play footy again. I feel there is an element of that. I need to 100 per cent invest in the group and the club, but there is a part of me that wants to prove to myself that I can play footy again.

"Aspirations for just being a leader around the club is probably where my head is at. If that sort of thing happens, it happens, but I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying, 'I want to be captain'. I want to be a leader around here and that’s my aspiration."

Sicily is out of contract for the first time in his 93-game career. There is a school of thought that club and player won't be rushed to put pen to paper. After missing so much football, both want to see what level he can return to this year to get a better sense of his value.

Most players don't have too much to do with the list manager once they are drafted, other than crossing paths in the corridors, carpark and at the coffee machine.

But Sicily has a different relationship with one of the key men making the decision on his contract, which could take some time to finalise with his manager, Scott Lucas.

"It's a weird feeling, personally," he said.

"I've never been out of contract. There is an element that the club would want to see me prove myself and get back to the level I'm capable of. It's an interesting time and I think it will run its course."

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Sicily was taken at pick No. 56 in the 2013 NAB AFL Draft in a selection that has proven to be a genuine bargain and should prove to be even better by the end of his career.

But even the man himself, the man with a keen eye for list management, wouldn’t have taken himself any higher at the time.

"I think 56 was a reflection of where I was at. I was pretty raw. I didn’t really know the AFL landscape and what it took to be an AFL player. I went through talent pathways but I wasn’t a high level at a young age," he said.

"It took me probably four years to get going. Luckily enough the club was in a good spot where they weren’t searching for talent right away, so I was able to serve an apprenticeship at Box Hill. Learn what was expected of being an AFL footballer."

And with that Hawthorn has its most important player back on the park. They also might have their next captain. And potentially a future list manager.