Perth Glory forward Jacob Dowse’s journey into professional football is a story built on resilience, patience and unwavering belief. Dowse tells KEEPUP’s Matt Comito how he persevered through five serious knee injuries in his teens to seize his “only chance” to break through.
Jacob Dowse was just 12 years old when he tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his right knee.
“It was just before my 13th birthday,” he recalls. “I didn’t even know what an ACL was.”
He would soon enough. It was the first of five serious knee injuries he would suffer throughout his teenage years.
By the time he turned 19, Dowse had been through it all: he’d spent months upon months on crutches, endured multiple operations, had pins put in one leg, and blood extracted from bone to mimic the cartilage destroyed in both of his knees.
The ACL in his right knee, in fact, is not an ACL at all. It’s a piece of his father’s hamstring, grafted into Dowse’s knee when his injury woes first began.
That was 10 years ago; now he’s a professional footballer, relishing his first season in the Isuzu UTE A-League at Perth Glory.
“I look back on it now, and I don’t know how I got through it,” Dowse tells KEEPUP, reflecting on his very first knee injury at just 12 years of age.
“They take a tendon from your hamstring and reattach that, and then that ends up being your ACL. Because I was so young and undeveloped, the surgeon didn’t want to take my own hamstring.
“It was either I get a graft from a donor, or dad has an operation as well and I get his hamstring.
“Dad would do anything for me, so it was a no-brainer for him I guess. He ended up having the operation at the same time as me down in Sydney.
“To this day I’ve still got dad’s hamstring in my right knee.
“I have a joke with him. Because (I’m left-footed) and it’s in my right knee I say: ‘I don’t really use my right foot anyway, so it’s kind of just there to help me get on buses isn’t it?’
“He was playing over-35’s (football) at the time, and that was kind of his retirement. So he always has a joke that I put him into retirement.
“I think it was a good thing he stopped playing anyway!”
The timeline of Dowse’s repeat injury woes makes it all the more remarkable to watch him fly up and down the left flank for Perth Glory in the 2022-23 Isuzu UTE A-League season.
His first ACL injury in his right knee at 12 years of age called for more than a year of rehabilitation. Then came the complex and excruciating experience of the attachment that kept his left ACL connected to his lower leg pulling off the bone.
That happened once – then it happened again. The doctors inserted pins in his leg to help the healing on the second occasion.
At 17 came the cartilage defect issues.
“It’s not as bad (as an ACL), but still a lengthy time out,” Dowse says. “I had a spot in my knee where I had no cartilage. You can’t regrow cartilage, once your cartilage is gone it’s gone. What (the surgeons) did was make the bone bleed, and eventually over time that blood stays there and acts as cartilage.
“I was 17 when the first one happened on my right, then I was 19 for the second one when it happened on my left. Around that age you’ve got your mates, you want to be social, but I was always stuck on crutches.
“With my right one, I couldn’t drive so I was having to get lifts to school, everywhere. I was really reliant on the people around me.
“I remember mum and I had an argument. I was 10 weeks into non-weight bearing, and all my mates wanted to go out. I was like: ‘I’m going’, and she didn’t want me to go. I just ended up throwing the crutches and said: ‘I’m done’.
“I got to the point where I thought: ‘What’s the point?’ You can’t see the light at the (end of the) tunnel, you think it’s just going to keep happening and happening.”
In his mid-teens, Dowse was part of the Newcastle Jets youth side. But by 2017 he was disillusioned by the repeat injuries, and stepped away from the A-League Men club’s junior setup.
Before long, Dowse’s best friend and captain of Broadmeadow Magic Jeremy Wilson had convinced him to try his hand at the Northern NSW NPL club.
That’s where Dowse first met Ruben Zadkovich, then-Broadmeadow head coach and current Perth Glory boss.
Zadkovich gave Dowse his first-grade debut at 16. His cartilage defect injuries were to follow. It’s the same condition that cut Zadkovich’s own career short, forcing him to retire at just 29. If anyone was placed to guide Dowse through those arduous times, it was the former A-Leagues hard-man.
Zadkovich departed his role at Broadmeadow in 2019 – but that wasn’t where his relationship with Dowse would end.
Three years later Dowse was thriving at Broadmeadow under head coach Damien Zane who, together with strength and conditioning coach Luke Mitchell, worked meticulously with the forward to prioritise his health over results.
Zane and Mitchell would monitor Dowse’s GPS data, and if his training loads were too high, he wouldn’t play. It’s what unleashed Dowse’s potential. He was setting the NPL alight when Zadkovich’s name pinged on his phone.
“It’s funny looking back on it, I was working at a hospital in Newcastle as a wardsman and playing footy in the arvo, training two or three times a week,” Dowse remembers. “I was comfortable with life, I enjoyed my job but deep down I always wanted to be a footballer.
“You always have that thought in the back of your mind (will I ever make it in football?), but deep down I always backed myself to eventually get there.
“I remember getting the phone call while I was at work. I thought: ‘Why is Rubes ringing me?’ I hadn’t spoken to him in a while. When I answered we were just chatting about life, and he said: ‘I’ve been watching you, you’ve been doing really well – I want to bring you over here and give you a chance’.
“Maybe a month or six weeks went by, and I still didn’t know when it was going to happen, when I was going over, how I was getting over. Then he gave me a phone call on a Friday night and said ‘I want you here on Monday’.
“I flew over with only a suitcase. On the plane, he still hadn’t told me where I was staying. I got off the plane and (Glory keeper Cameron Cook) picked me up, and I stayed at his place for a few nights. I had never met Cooky in my life. I just had to go with it.
Dowse spent the following two weeks staying at Zadkovich’s house, with his wife and three young girls. “It was a bit of carnage at times with the three girls,” Dowse adds. On the odd occasion, the Glory triallist was left with babysitting duties.
It was all in the hope of fulfilling a lifelong dream of making it in football.
Before he departed for Perth, Dowse fronted up to local media at home in Newcastle, and expressed in just one sentence what was motivating him to make that leap of faith a success.
“This might be the only chance I get.”
Dowse turned that chance on trial into a scholarship contract. He’s made 14 league appearances for Perth since, supplying five assists which have often proved point-saving or match-winning.
He would never have earned that initial opportunity if not for Zadkovich, who cut his teeth coaching in the NPL.
Dowse believes identifying talented NPL players – and being brave enough to take a punt on them – is a challenge more A-League Men coaches should take on.
“They’re out there, there are talented players in the NPL,” Dowse says. “There are heaps of them. You’ve just got to look for the right qualities and find them, and know they want to get to the next level as well, that they’ve got that drive.”
“Look at Keegan (Jelacic) as well: he’s from the NPL,” Dowse adds. Glory signed Jelacic after a standout season at NPL Queensland side Olympic FC after a brief spell at Brisbane Roar. He’s been one of Perth’s best players this season at just 19 years of age.
“100%, they are out there. The hard bit is finding them.”
Dowse and Glory travel interstate to take on Sydney FC on Sunday, April 16 in the club’s third-last fixture of the A-League Men season; on an unbeaten streak of four games, Glory are just one point behind the sixth-placed Sky Blues and can end the weekend in the finals placings should they orchestrate a win on the road.
For Dowse, the road trip may present a brief opportunity to see family and friends at home in Newcastle. Back home to the Hunter is where the 22-year-old is expected to venture next season, with the club announcing his planned departure at the season’s end in March.
It says a lot about the mutual respect held between both Glory and Dowse that the scholarship player’s departure announcement was executed with more than a three-line statement, as you so often see.
Instead the club released a 500+ word article full of glowing praise from Dowse to the club, and vice versa.
“Ruben has done everything for me,” said Dowse at the time. “Not just football-wise, but off the field as well from when I was a young 16-year-old where our journey started together, to now being a 22-year-old A-League player.
“I wouldn’t be where I am today if it wasn’t for him wanting me to better myself and his continued belief in me.”
Zadkovich repaid the compliments: “To watch ‘Dowsey’ grow from a young kid into a young man and then see him make his mark at the professional level in Australia has been a very rewarding process. I’m extremely proud of how he has acquitted himself here at Glory and will be following his career from afar very closely indeed.”
Glory’s head of recruitment Andy Keogh, meanwhile, hinted Dowse “wanted to return home to Newcastle”, and although the move is yet to be confirmed, a return to the Jets, his junior club, appears on the cards.
“It was such a tough decision not to stay here,” Dowse tells KEEPUP. “I love everyone here, the staff, the players, we’ve got a really good group.
“It was a really, really tough decision – but at the end of the day, I don’t regret it. I’m looking forward to what’s to come for the next few years.”
