How John Orchard went from footy diehard to become cricket's top doctor John Orchard (standing on the left) celebrates with players after Tony Lockett put the Swans into the 1996 grand final. In 1989, maniacal Hawthorn supporter John Orchard published an acerbic and one-eyed book on football called Life, The Universe and Football. In it he described the Sydney Swans as "not quite a football team ... more like a business venture that has gone tragically wrong, "that had treated players like pieces of meat." Four years later he was the Swans' club doctor. Orchard - recently appointed the chief medical officer of Cricket Australia - is a highly respected veteran within the country's sports medicine field. He is also a former sports journalist at The Age. John Orchard's 1989 book Life, The Universe and Football. He was hired in 1985 after creating a football computer tipping program while a University of Melbourne medical student. For two decades, "The Age Computer" provided weekly tips alongside the newspaper's writers, and Orchard swears it was the real deal. It was a legitimate program. There were certainly some people that thought we just made them up, but I actually did have some programming skills and wrote it," he said. For a while that was the extent of Orchard's association with The Age, but after a flurry of injuries to prominent players, sports editors got wind that there was a medical student doing a little bit of work for the paper. Soon Orchard was penning articles analysing and explaining injuries. A long-term career in the sports media didn't beckon, but the early taste Orchard got for writing later manifested itself in medical journals - with Orchard a prolific academic writer - with about 200 articles to his name. What has helped Orchard become an authority is the fledgling nature of the field itself. "When I finished med school I was just starting to hear that sports medicine was becoming a possible career path," he said. I thought that would really suit me having a small taste in it working in journalism early on. In 1992 he became one of the first people in the country to begin formally studying sports medicine as a specialty. That year he trained under Peter Brukner - alongside whom he now shares the top medical posts at CA - while in his final year at university, Orchard took a medical elective under Peter Larkins. Both Brukner and Larkins have followed Orchard's lead by becoming regular voices within the sports media. Ironically, while Orchard believes that sports medicine is still looked down upon as a poor relation within mainstream medical circles, the lofty place sport holds within Australian culture means that its leading practitioners get more exposure than doctors in almost any other field. We're at the bottom order in terms of credibility. We're sort of seen as blow-ins," Orchard said. It is still a rarity for sports medicine to be taught in Australian universities, but with more than 150 sports doctors now practising around Australia, sports medicine has found its place. It has taken Orchard on a two-decade-long journey - during which time he has worked in the AFL, NRL, cricket, baseball, basketball and soccer. The punt that it was going to become a legitimate field has well and truly paid off. It's now well and truly established and quite competitive to get into. When he toured India with the Australian cricket team in 2007 sending doctors overseas with the national team was a relatively new concept, but since 2010 there has been a doctor accompany the men's team on any international tour, while junior and women's tours without medical representation are now the exception rather than the rule. In his book, Orchard described Hawthorn as "a reason for living, for battling on, for continually plotting the downfall of evil forces of the Carltons and the Essendons of this world." Despite the Hawks' continued success, Orchard's devotion has waned. While his former life allows him to understand the mindset, he believes that it is unhealthy for sports doctors to see the world through a diehard's eyes. "You've got to avoid that fan mentally," he said. To actually get caught up in it myself and enjoyed doing it I can understand it, but I think going to clubs where I wasn't a supporter was a good thing, because you need to be able to step back and not take the 'whatever-it-takes' mindset. As doctor for the NRL's Sydney Roosters in 2002, Orchard saw first-hand how player welfare can sometimes take a back seat to the lure of sporting success. Orchard had allowed Roosters player Luke Phillips to play in the grand final despite Phillips carrying a shoulder injury. The Roosters won the game, and by chance Orchard crossed paths with Phillips' mother not long after. The doctor braced himself for a torrent of abuse from a mother incredulous that this man had allowed her boy risk harm. But rather than berate Orchard, Phillips' mum thanked him for allowing her son to play and fulfill a boyhood dream. But Orchard needs no reminder of sport's importance, 25 years ago he wrote that: "Footy is life. Life is footy. Life equals footy.