Casey Dumont is relishing her return to Melbourne Victory after a year out with injury, writes Tom Smithies
The rigours of pre-season never felt so good, let alone the feeling of actually playing a real game.
For Casey Dumont, every minute of her return to action has been something to be lived, not endured. Absence truly does make the heart grow fonder after more than a year in recovery from a significant injury.
It also helps that the Melbourne Victory goalkeeper has quite a sense of perspective, having worked on COVID wards as a nurse for much of the pandemic. In the midst of literal life or death situations, the old joke about football’s importance doesn’t ring so true.
Most of all Dumont is just delighted to be back on the pitch, in goal for a Victory side already showing that its defence of last year’s championship win will be formidable.
Dumont missed that whole season after collapsing with a ruptured Achilles in the last round of the NSW NPL regular season, in the most innocuous fashion possible. It’s hardly the first serious inury she has had to contend with, having torn her ACL on her Matildas debut and suffered a lascerated liver in a W-League game.
“I literally took off to run out for a through ball, took off and went down,” she said. “If I hadn’t done my Achilles, it would have just been an easy pick-up ball.
“But you could hear it go, the sound wasn’t good. I knew instantly it was either a break or my Achilles.
“We’d gone into that game needing to win to make the finals, but I came off and we ended up losing.”
The injury had broader ramifications beyond her immediate playing career. For close to a decade, Dumont has spent the A-League Women off-season as a nurse, and had secured a job in Sydney once she signed to play that NPL season with Blacktown.
“I had been nursing during the whole COVID pandemic,” she said. “I was fortunate enough that when I went from Queensland to Sydney to do the NPL, I had got a job straight away.
“So the first call I made after my Achilles went – besides to my mom and my partner at the time – was to work, to let them know what happened, and my boss was amazing. She was like, that’s fine, if you’re happy we’ll put you on desk duty.
“She just said, ‘Get all your surgery and everything sorted but if you’re happy to stay with us we’re happy to have you.’ So it turned into teleconferences and things like that, during Covid there weren’t many in-person appointments.
“I’m very, very fortunate to be able to say I work with them because my boss was amazing. She was even amazing with me deciding that I wanted to come back to soccer – she told me, chase your dreams, this job will always be here if you’re happy to come back. I knew I still had the passion and she understood that.”
By the end of June she had the greenlight to return to training in July – just as Sydney went into lockdown.
“It could have been a frustration but it’s actually been a blessing in disguise because I’ve had more time to make sure that I’m okay, and focus on pushing myself and making that workload high.
“Coming out of a major injury, sometimes you get little niggles that I’ve been able to completely bypass because I’ve had more time to focus. So now there’s no fear whatsoever. The body is feeling very good.
“The first week (of pre-season) was a bit of a wake up call, because obviously it’s been a while. But it’s really good to see that you live and breathe it a lot more, which is great.
“It’s made me realise that I missed it even more than I thought – and that was a lot already.
“I could see straight away that we’ve got very high expectations and can show teams that (winning the title) wasn’t a one-off thing.
“I was at Victory for three seasons (before the injury) so I know the club and I know the people, I know what’s expected.
“The goal is to go back to back and make sure that week in, week out, we’re going to be the ones to chase and the ones to beat.
“We’ll make it a bloody hard fight for every single team that we play against.”
