Sydney Swans coach John Longmire isn't ruling out injured trio Jarrad McVeigh, Dan Hannebery and Heath Grundy ahead of the Swans' historic opening round match against the Eagles on Sunday night.
Both premiership midfielders have been nursing calf-related injuries recently, with McVeigh in particular training strongly throughout the pre-season.
While neither took part in the JLT Series, Swans Head of Football Tom Harley confirmed that the Swans will use Thursday's main training session to test their fitness.
“We will test Dan later in the week but he is certainly pushing very close to availability for selection, so that is pleasing,” Harley told the HCF Injury Update.
“Jarrad has had a really good pre-season and had a minor calf strain where we took a conservative approach but we are expecting him to be available.
“We are expecting Callum to also be available. He trained strongly today and will train on Thursday, so we expect him to play.”
Longmire told RSN Radio on Tuesday morning that he would give the important pair every change to prove their fitness ahead of the trip to Perth.
“They’ve been training and training really well, so that’s a really good sign” Longmire told RSN.
“We’ve got a training session today and a training session Thursday to sit back and make those decisions.
“They’re putting their cases forward in a training sense, which is all you can ask.
“We’ll make that call on Thursday.”
Sinclair, who has his own injury concerns, is likely to make his way back into the team having declared himself fit this week, and is the one most likely to face-off against Eagles star Nic Naitanui if he's passed fit.
"We've got Sinclair who we expect to come back into the team this week and play after rolling his ankle a couple of weeks ago," Longmire said.
"We probably played six or seven games last year with only one ruckman, so we've done that before.
"We were probably thinking of going along those lines anyway, and we'll just have to come up with different ways (to compete in the ruck)."
Heath Grundy missed both JLT pre-season games due to calf issues, but is firmly in the mix for selection this week.
The 31-year-old enjoyed another stellar season in 2017, narrowly missing out of All Australian selection, performed strongly last weekend against Sydney University.
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