Perth’s Glory’s Scott Neville is pulling out all the stops to ensure he’s 100 percent fit for the rest of the season and many more to come.
Although the club enjoyed a rare week of light duties during the FIFA international break, Neville’s been using the time to catch up on yoga and pilates classes in order to ensure his body remain at the top of its game.
The regime seems to be working as Neville blitzed the time trials at a light training session last week, easily lapping some of his more seasoned team-mates as he demonstrated he’s well and truly over the pre-season groin injury that almost de-railed his second Hyundai A-League season.
“When I did have the groin problem, I was doing pilates and I went and saw the Western Force doctor, Mark DeCruz, and he was saying, ‘even when you get over your groin problem, I still recommend doing pilates at least once a week’,” Neville said.
“So I’ve just kind of taken it upon myself to keep doing ’cause the benefits from it are just unreal.”
Neville said that chatting with experienced Glory team-mate Andy Todd had opened his eyes to the various techniques used by European players to maintain their fitness and longevity in the game.
“The goalkeeper at Aston Villa, Brad Friedel, he’s been doing yoga for five, six years now every day and he’s like 39 and apparently not even close to retirement,” Neville said, saying Todd saw the results first-hand when both players were at Blackburn.
“(And Andy Todd), he’s still looking like he’s 25 when he’s actually a little bit older which is unbelievable.”
“It just proves to you that if you do the right things on and off the park, it only benefits you and the team.”
Neville himself has endured a mixed season so far. Heavily hyped at the start of the year, the 20-year-old suffered a virus midway through the Round 5 clash with Central Coast and had to be substituted before being rested the following week.
As Jamie Coyne had recovered from an early-season knee injury and was able to return to his regular position at right back, it took Neville five weeks to return to the starting line-up for the clash with Gold Coast United.
That match proved a horror one for the youngster as a deflection off him in the first half saw United take the lead. But worse was to come as he and Jamie Coyne were responsible for Gold Coast taking the lead once more, just 11 seconds after Perth had equalised.
A collision between the pair saw Joel Porter easily take possession and cross for Shane Smeltz to score.
But in the face of such a widely-seen mistake, Neville said he was determined to learn from the error and still view the United game as a positive experience that will just see him get better with age.
“Straight after the game, I was a bit down but then straight away Kenny (assistant Kenny Lowe) and the coaching staff showed me the video,” Neville said.
“They said, ‘look, you actually played quite well apart from obviously an unfortunate own goal and the collision’, so you have to take the positives over the negatives, I guess.”
“The second goal was just a bit of miscommunication on mine and Jamie’s part, but you’ve just got to learn from those couple of mistakes and hopefully it will never happen again,” he said.
