Matildas star Hayley Raso’s journey from back injury to the World Cup
Fracturing vertebrae would have halted many athletes’ ambitions. But it’s just made gritty Hayley Raso more determined to chase World Cup glory with the Matildas next month.
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Soccer star Hayley Raso makes it obvious she’d rather be running than smiling. As she poses for the camera, it takes the intuition of an experienced photographer to coax the Matildas forward out of her shell.
That, and a mention of California’s hippest music festival.
“Three … two … one … Coachella!”
Raso cracks a grin, perhaps against her better judgment. But there are good reasons she’s itching to get out of the spotlight and into the gym.
It’s partly because Raso isn’t entirely comfortable in the limelight, but she also has so much time to make up and so much World Cup glory to chase.
Being back in Australia wasn’t part of Raso’s plan just weeks out from the tournament. A US visa issue forced her into a long-haul flight home even before she had kicked a competitive ball for Portland Thorns in the 2019 National Women’s Soccer League season.
Raso appears mildly annoyed at missing valuable pre-tournament game time. But really, when you consider the past 12 months — broken back and all — it’s barely a blip on the radar.
She trains remotely in Australia while awaiting her visa paperwork. Then it’s straight back to the US, followed by Australia’s pre-tournament camp in Turkey, a friendly in the Netherlands and onto France for next month’s big dance.
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Raso was among 23 players named in the Matildas squad this week.
Four years ago, at the last World Cup in Canada, the only thing that stopped the then 20-year-old playing a single minute was the coach’s selection calls. This time, the threat has been three fractured vertebrae and the small matter of relearning to walk.
Eight months on from a freak on-field collision with a blameless opposition goalkeeper while playing for Portland, Raso is running, anxious to start rehab before a session with the Future Matildas.
That’s her real priority, not a photo shoot next to the training field.
The 24-year-old does another shoot with fashion bible Vogue that afternoon. And though she shares it with her 30,000 Instagram followers, you get the feeling this endearingly understated talent still isn’t altogether at ease with the whole fame thing.
Teammate Sam Kerr is an old hand at this stuff. But for Raso, a year Kerr’s junior, being so highly sought-after remains a relative novelty.
“I think it’s good,” Raso says.
“You know, the exposure and stuff like that. Getting my image and my brand out there, but also for women in sport and for the Matildas.”
Even before her accident garnered global attention, Raso was on the way up, having cemented her spot as a regular starter in one of Australia’s most popular national sporting teams.
The NWSL season with the Thorns in 2018 and W-League season just gone with the Brisbane Roar offered glimpses of the chaos this slightly built ball of energy can cause — bloodthirsty runs, detecting a sliver of space and slipping the knife straight through the guts. Or just her utter lack of hesitation to take players on.
“It’s that absolute desire to wreak havoc on any team,” says Raso’s Roar coach Mel Andreatta.
“She won’t take a backwards step. She just doesn’t fear any opponent.
“She’s always going to do something to change the game. I think that’s what you’ll see this World Cup campaign.”
Many a defender will attest that catching Raso can be an often hopeless enterprise — like an antelope on the escape.
Fellow Matildas and Thorns forward Caitlin Foord remembers playing in the same New South Wales touch football team when the pair were 11.
“Back in primary school, I remember Raso was a winger because she was really quick,” Foord says.
“We always laugh about it because there’s actually a photo of us next to each other that’s pretty funny.”
Touch rugby — unlike less-serious forays into basketball and netball — competed with soccer well into Raso’s teens.
It wasn’t until after a collision at a tournament in New Zealand that the decision to stick with the round ball was made.
“I was playing touch football for Queensland and me and another girl from my team collided,” Raso says.
“My teeth hit her head, so she was knocked out immediately, and all my front teeth were everywhere.
“We went to hospital together … I chose soccer after that.”
Raso’s description of how she even got into soccer sounds equally accidental.
She’d never heard of the Matildas, but her dad used to coach soccer and older brother Lachlan played, so she’d join in.
Others recognised her ability well before she twigged herself.
“I think I just had some speed and people used to say, ‘Oh, she’s pretty good’,” Raso says.
“I just kept playing for that reason, and I definitely fell in love with it. When I was playing locally on the Gold Coast, a coach said to me, ‘You should go and trial for Canberra United’.
“So I got on a plane and flew down there and trialled, and that’s when I got signed to my first W-League contract.”
Raso, then 16, won the premiership-championship double in her first season in the capital.
That was the springboard for a Matildas debut in 2012 and a return to Brisbane with the Roar.
By 20, she’d been picked in Alen Stajcic’s 2015 World Cup squad, though she didn’t play.
The same year she joined Washington Spirit, making a handful of appearances before being cut from the roster in 2016. That year she also missed Rio Olympics selection.
But the Spirit’s loss was Portland’s gain, and Raso was soon a regular starter in its NWSL-winning team to cap a breakthrough 2017.
Andreatta had a feeling Raso would make it when she first laid eyes on her as a raw 15-year-old at Brisbane’s National Training Centre program, then run by Jeff Hopkins, now Melbourne Victory W-League coach.
“She just goes 100 miles an hour with everything, not just on the field,” Andreatta says.
“That’s probably what obviously stood out, other than her football talent.
“Early on in her career, when teams realised she was pretty quick, they tried to use their physical dominance over her. But she would just keep getting up, no matter what type of tackle or treatment she’d get.
“She’d keep battling on. She’s a real fighter. She’s also a larrikin. She’ll have a laugh and call you out if you’ve done something silly. But she cops it, too. She’s a good egg.”
HER FAMILY LIFE
There’s a quiet, steely resilience about Raso that seems to contradict the affectionately humorous anecdotes of her tendency to call a spade a spade.
It’s like her on-field dress sense — her signature preppy hair ribbons teamed with rebellious rolled-up sleeves.
If forced to slot herself into the introvert or extrovert category, she swings towards the latter.
“But I don’t know, I feel like I’m torn on it,” she says.
“I think I’m very loud and bubbly and open. But at the same time, sometimes I just like a bit of my own time.”
That’s evident in Raso’s manner — direct, and not one for surplus words. Personal details are drip-fed and it takes time to form a full picture of her tight-knit family that’s genuinely been through the wringer the past few years.
Raso is the youngest of three children, and has four step-siblings through her stepdad.
Her eldest brother Jordan has a severe intellectual disability.
“He’s a 29-year-old man, but his brain is like a three-year-old child,” Raso says.
“He never went to a normal school, he’s cared for 24/7 in a home now.
“He has autism, epilepsy, but it’s kind of unknown, so we just say he’s intellectually disabled. Growing up living with him was tough, and obviously tough for my family.”
Eventually it became clear Jordan needed around-the-clock care, and he was moved into a group home when Raso was a teenager.
“It’s made it easier on my mum and my family,” she says.
“That was tough, but he’s happy and I think that’s the most important thing.
“We see him all the time. He comes up to our house and goes up to my dad’s house.
“I look at people like him who haven’t lived a normal life, and I just feel lucky and blessed. Everybody should kind of feel that way.
“We can go to school and have friends, and I can play soccer and travel the world and do
all the things I love. He’s never had the opportunity to do that, so I think it’s really important to cherish the things that we can do.”
Raso also reveals that her other brother Lachlan, 27, a civil engineer, had open-heart surgery three years ago. At the time, she was playing with Washington, a helpless spectator on the other side of the world.
“That was huge, and a really hard time for my family,” she says.
“It made it extremely difficult, knowing that your brother’s having such a major surgery and you’re not there by his side.
“I wanted to come home, I wanted to be there through it all, but he said to me that while he was recovering he wanted to watch me play soccer and keep doing what I love.
“It took a long time and he couldn’t do a lot for a few years, but now he’s started playing sport again.
“I feel for my mum. She’s looked after my oldest brother his whole life. She’s then had
to deal with my brother’s open-heart surgery, and then she obviously was with me the
whole time with my broken back. She’s a very strong woman.”
THE INJURY
On the afternoon last August when an accidental aerial collision with Washington Spirit goalkeeper Aubrey Bledsoe left Raso with a non-displaced fracture of her L2, L3 and L4 vertebrae, her mum Renaye Sweeting was watching the livestream on a laptop in Australia.
She knew immediately something had gone very wrong — partly because she’s a nurse and partly because her daughter never stays down.
Raso’s dad, who happened to be in the stands, was with her that first night in hospital.
Sweeting got the first flight to Washington and stayed three weeks before Raso was transferred back to Portland and then to the Gold Coast to start her recovery.
In the interim, there were bouts of excruciating pain, some so bad she lost consciousness, and from there, rolling over in bed, sitting in a chair, then upgrading to a wheelchair and walking frame.
Finally, the big one — getting back on the pitch and into World Cup calculations.
In late January, Raso made her Roar comeback, then a month later, at the inaugural Cup of Nations, her landmark 31st Matildas cap.
Raso had spent a decent chunk of her hospital stay painting a mental picture of an international return she worried might never come — a rousing reception from the crowd, how she’d score within a minute of setting foot on the pitch.
In reality, it took three minutes — four touches of the ball, to be precise, the last a cheeky nip around a New Zealand defender to pot her angled shot for a 2-0 win.
That moment, Raso remembers, was “surreal”. Her entire family was there, the familiar faces she says saw her through all the dark days and out the other side.
But there weren’t tears, just a low-key fist-pump en route to the open arms of Thorns teammate and Matildas roomie Ellie Carpenter. No frills. Only ribbons.
Grandma is the sole supplier, buying her granddaughter’s trademark trimmings and matching the colours to her jerseys. Yellow for the Matildas. Orange for Brisbane Roar. Red for the Thorns.
Like Raso’s family, they’re a steadying constant amid all the change of recent years, and the rest still to come.
“I have two goals,” Raso says.
“To go to the World Cup and play minutes, and to go to the Olympics … once I do those two things, I’ll feel pretty happy within myself.”
* The Matildas open their World Cup campaign against Italy on Sunday, June 9, at 9pm Australian time.
Originally published as Matildas star Hayley Raso’s journey from back injury to the World Cup
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