From rejection and rehab to a World Cup and goal of the week – the Andrew Nabbout story keeps unfolding, writes Tom Smithies
Complacency? That’s not a word to use around Andrew Nabbout. At 28, Melbourne City’s forward is at the point of hitting his peak, but there isn’t the merest hint of resting on any laurels.
Having climbed the mountain of professional football by an often complicated route, an Alpine analogy is his best response to the question of how City find the motivation to repeat last year’s premiership and championship double.
“You get to the top of one mountain, and you look for the higher one and see how you can get up the top of that one, don’t you?” asks a player who knows the feeling of being selected to start at a World Cup, but also the feeling of being told he was not good enough for a contract.
The quiet steeliness with which he says it sums up the career of a player who has consistently proved experts wrong: pundits, doctors, coaches.
You can see it in the way he always returns from injury quicker than expected, so furiously does he attack his rehab programs. You can see it in the way he took a detour to Malaysia after being released by Melbourne Victory and rejected by the Mariners.
You can see it in the way he earned a spot in Newcastle and excelled before being signed by Urawa Reds, and then eventually by City.
Perhaps most starkly, you could see it in the fact that a player on crutches and in obvious distress on May 13 was playing in the finals 28 days later despite having torn a tendon off the bone. Tough times make for a tough competitor.
“That’s the one answer I give to anyone when they ask how I recover from injury so quick, it’s that you think about all the low times in your career, and you think about all the high times,” Nabbout says. “The highs are definitely when you’re enjoying it. So when I’m sitting in the gym, trying to rehab and I just work as hard as I can to get back early.
“In May, it was a pretty severe injury and when I came back, I was nowhere near 100%. But I knew I had to try and find something to get back for the finals.
“I think I do surprise myself every time I do rehab but especially, this time, just because I completely snapped my tendon off the bone which normally takes a lot longer.
“If you had asked me a few years ago, when I was younger and coming through at Melbourne Victory, that I was going to be doing all these things with my career, I probably wouldn’t have believed you right then and there.
“But in the back of my mind, I had a plan and I had goals that I wanted to tick off. And, you know, I’ve ticked off a few of them. But there’s still a couple to go, I want to get as many national team caps under my belt as possible.
“I want to go to another World Cup, I want to achieve so many things.”
His strike against Adelaide last weekend – winning Goal of the Week – indicates a forward in a hurry to do just that. Bert van Marwijk saw enough in him to start him against France and Denmark at the 2018 World Cup, and now he is part of City’s new attacking trident – with Jamie Maclaren and Mathew Leckie – that Patrick Kisnorbo believes will drive his side to more success.
“We’ve got one title under our belt, but you look at clubs like Victory and Sydney, they’ve got three, four, five championships under their belt,” says Nabbout. “And that’s what we’ve got to start chasing.
“We’ve got a good group of experienced boys in the team and we’re driving the young players as much as we can every day.
“Me, Lecks and Macca, with all our finishing, with the drills where we work on our runs, the pressing and everything, we just make sure that we’re at the highest standards.
“We’ve played together in the national team, we know what the standards have to be.
“I was actually talking to Stefan Kolokovski today after we did a little bit of finishing, and he said, ‘There’s no better feeling of scoring, even in training.
“He’s like, I know it doesn’t count in training but there’s still no better feeling than watching the ball hit the back of the net.
“You wonder why Jamie has so much fun, it’s because he’s hitting the back of the net twice every game…”
