Vice-Captain Pearce Hanley has backed his Lions teammates to cover his long-term absence and launch into a strong start to the 2015 AFL Premiership Season.

Hanley, who will has been ruled out until the middle of the season after successful hip surgery last week, said the Club's "middle tier" of players had stepped up on a hot preseason of training.

"We’ve got great depth and I’ve got full confidence in the boys that they are going to get off to a great start,’’ he told The Sunday Mail.

“They have been training the house down, I’ve been watching them every day and it will be the middle-tier blokes who really step up for us.

“You don’t have to worry about the likes of Tom Rockliff, Daniel Rich or Dayne Beams producing a really high level of football, it will be the middle tier where our improvement comes from.’’

Hanley - who will talk to Lions TV on Monday, so stay tuned members - had surgery on Wednesday after developing soreness in recent weeks, expecting to spend 12 weeks in recovery.

However, the operation to clean up bone and cartilage in the hip was more extensive once doctors examined the injury.

The recovery timeline is now 18 weeks until Hanley is expected to be back playing, around the middle of the AFL Premiership season.

Hanley was shattered when told his hip injury was worse than first thought, but has declared the injury is “not the end of the world’’ and he is grateful the hip problem is being addressed.

He said if he played and trained through the pain he first felt in his right hip after Christmas, his football career may have been cut short.

“From what the specialist said, it nearly could have been career-ending,’’ Hanley said.

“A lot of what was wrong with my hips did not show up in scans, so if I did keep training and played the start of the season, I would have done more damage.

“While it is very disappointing to not be playing the first half of the year, for the longevity of my career, it was a good move to get in and get it looked at.

“It’s been years in the making apparently, so we were lucky to get to it and fix it up now. I was initially devastated to be out for the first month or so of the season, and to add six weeks to that was pretty upsetting.

“But it’s not the end of the world … that’s football, you are going to get injuries.’’

Senior Coach Justin Leppitsch said: "We may have lost him for another six weeks but we've gained a couple of years of his career by catching the problem now.

"It's almost a career-saving injury, that's how I'm looking at it.

"It's bad luck for Pearce but we can't dwell on it. We have no other option but to get on with it.

Hanley said the silver lining to the cloud hanging over his season is that he will get to spend more time with younger brother Cian, who is recovering from a knee reconstruction.

“We spend a lot of time at home together and now I’m stuck with him in the rehab group so there is a lot of brotherly bonding ahead,’’ he said.

For updates on Hanley’s recovery, hear from Brett Burton, Elite Performance Manager of the Bupa Support Team at the Lions in the video above.