North Melbourne forward Drew Petrie to replace injured captain Andrew Swallow North Melbourne forward Drew Petrie will captain the Kangaroos in Andrew Swallow's absence. NORTH Melbourne captain Andrew Swallow will resume running before the end of the year as he begins his recovery from an Achilles injury. Swallow underwent successful surgery on Sunday morning to repair damage to the ruptured Achilles tendon in his left leg, suffered the day before against Melbourne at Etihad Stadium. Veteran Drew Petrie will captain the team for the remainder of the season, coach Brad Scott confirmed today. Hawthorn's Jarryd Roughead ruptured his Achillies tendon in Round 12, 2011 and returned in Round 2, 2012. Collingwood's Anthony Rocca suffered the same injury in Round 4, 2005 and was back for the start of the 2006 season. Swallow has already been in contact with Roughead and was left with an air of confidence about his potential recovery time. Scott said the 26-year-old's leaner figure, as compared to Roughead and Rocca, would aid his recovery. "Typical in Andrew Swallow style he's already been in contact with Jarryd Roughead," Scott said. I'm really rapt that Jarryd also tried to contact Andrew as well. It was a great gesture on Roughy's behalf. Roughy had given him a certain level of confidence with the recovery and certainly being lighter will help - that's he surgeon's advice too, that the lighter guys tend to make speedier recoveries. So we're very hopeful there. Scott said he had not earmarked any potential return date for Swallow as yet. "We're not looking that far ahead," he said. He's had the surgery, we were really fortunate to get him in on Sunday morning and get the surgery done. I saw him last night and he's in good spirits. We're just worried about getting through the acute phase for the next two weeks, then we'll assess it from there. But we're confident he can do running in some way shape or form in December and then it'll just be a matter of how quickly we can progress him to top-end speed from there. Friday night's clash with Geelong at Etihad Stadium will be the first time Scott has coached a North Melbourne side without Swallow in it. He said he considered making Jack Ziebell captain for the final five games of the year, but said it would have been too soon to heap such responsibility on the 22-year-old. "I'm delighted that Drew Petrie is going to captain our football club for the rest of the 2013 season," Scott said. We've got a really strong leadership group. We made a big decision to go with Andrew Swallow ... and to replace Brent Harvey, but we wanted to maintain Boomer in the leadership group in a mentoring capacity. But we also had Drew Petrie as our vice-captain as a great back-up to Andrew in case something happened to him. We see Jack as an absolute potential leader of our football club in the future, but the reality is that at the start of this year he was 21, so he's still very young. To put that in context he's still two years younger than Jack Grimes, who's captaining Melbourne. He's exceeded all of our expectations in terms of his leadership potential, but six months on we're not going to make a rash decision, and a silly decision in my view, when we've got a great leader in Drew Petrie there who's ready to captain the club and I think will do an outstanding job for us. Scott backed Swallow to make the most of his time on the sidelines. "We're obviously devastated for him," he said. But probably the most philosophical and level-headed person in all of this has been Andrew himself. He's a remarkable young guy ... He's the only person in his situation, or a situation like it, who actually considers himself pretty lucky. He's played 106 games in a row and playing this brutal sport it's unusual for players to play that many games without injury. He's philosophical, but he's really excited about the potential to elevate another leader in to the captaincy role in his absence. He'll continue to do some work with our team in an off-field sense and it'll also give him the chance to complete the last two units of his university degree as well. We'll also look at some other leadership opportunities overseas for him as well. There is a silver lining - there's no replacing Andrew Swallow, we know that - but we think we're really well serviced with a lot of great leaders at our club.