THINGS WENT PRETTY well for me on a personal level in my first season with Philadelphia Charge. The big headline was that I was named in the Women’s United Soccer Association Global Eleven All Star Team – quite a title – after the first season of the professional league, which was a real honour for me. I may not have played in a Women’s World Cup yet but I was able to hold my own against the very best in the world who had done so.
Philadelphia reached the end-of-season play-offs in the inaugural WUSA campaign, having finished in the top four. We were beaten in the semi-finals of the play-offs, 3–2, by Atlanta Beat. It was a devastating loss for us as we’d led 2–0 at one stage. I scored the opening goal, chesting down a flick-on from Mandy Clemens before striking the ball into the corner of the net. Mandy put us two up five minutes later, but then it all went wrong for us and we gave the game away. To make matters worse, late on I suffered a badly sprained ankle and had to come off, which was frustrating. My season ended there and then.
For the 2002 season I was named as the new captain at Philadelphia Charge following the retirement of Doris Fitschen, which was another honour bestowed on me by coach Mark Krikorian. He told me one of the reasons he chose me was the strength of character I had shown in returning so strongly to fitness. And I had worked hard at it, going through a demanding training schedule with strength and conditioning coach Duane Carlisle.
I put my heart and soul into getting back into the fold as quickly as I could. I drove over to Princeton every other day to work with Duane. He worked with the Philadelphia Eagles and was the best around. He set me to work on a plan to improve my speed and strength. He was great to work with. He knew which buttons to press with me, and I responded. My goal was to be one of the best players in the world, if not the best. I told Duane that, and we got down to work.
The other change at the Charge was the signing of France striker Marinette Pichon – a truly quality player. This would have a massive impact on my positional play, allowing me to move from a forward role into an attacking midfield role. So instead of playing with my back to goal I was now able to run at the goal and create attacks. I believe my true strength is running at players one-on-one – it always has been – and I was now free to do this in the WUSA for Philadelphia. It also brought some much-needed relief for my ankles. I was the most fouled player in the WUSA, and with my back to the goal my ankles had taken a battering. Given my growing record with injuries, it was a welcome change to play in a new position.
I started the campaign well again, scoring a neat free-kick in the opening match against Atlanta Beat. The opposition coach Tom Stone called it a ‘missile’. The team played well in the new formation, and Zhao Lihong popped up in the second half to secure the win.
Although I still viewed myself as someone who did her talking on the pitch rather than off it, I found that being captain was much easier than the time I’d spent as a coach at Seton Hall. Being the leader of the team in a playmaker role came much easier to me than doing team talks. I actually found that I revelled in my new-found responsibility. I was twenty-three years old and loving life. I scored four goals and added three assists in my first seven games.
Philadelphia were riding high, and so was I. It was around this time that they made a Kelly Smith Money Box for fans. It was a promotional idea a local bank came up with to attract young family members to start accounts with them. It was a good idea to build on the strong fan base we had with younger supporters. There was a natural connection there, and the players’ money boxes proved really popular. Around two thousand of them were given out before a match at our home stadium. If you get here early, you get your very own Kelly Smith Money Box! That kind of thing. I still have one at home. It was obviously modelled on me, with the number 8 on and everything. It’s quite life-like, actually. It’s a nice souvenir for me to have from those times at Philadelphia.
And then – crash! Everything was over again. I missed the rest of the season after tearing the anterior cruciate ligament in my right knee. This was the beginning of what would become a horror show for me.
It was my first serious injury, and it happened in a match against Bay Area CyberRays. It was nobody’s fault – it was down to the way I turned my body. When I went to put a cross in, my knee stayed where it was but my body turned. As a result my knee went ‘pop’. Everybody heard it. I knew straight away that I had torn it and that I was in trouble. Brandi Chastain, who played for the CyberRays, was close to me on the field. As the ball was kicked out of play, I remember her saying to me, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right?’ I can clearly recall my response too: ‘I’ve done my knee.’
I had completely torn my ACL – the middle ligament of the knee. It was totally flapping around in there. That was just bad luck due to the way I’d turned and the way the force impacted on my knee. The operation to repair it was lengthy and the recovery was a long and laborious one. The surgeon implanted a ‘cadaver’, which was actually an Achilles tendon from a guy who had been killed in a motorcycle accident, into my knee and sewed the ligament back together. Touch wood, it’s still going strong.
The injury was a whole new experience for me. Before it, all I had known were quad pulls, muscle pulls or sprains. Nothing had ever kept me out of the game long term before. But this did. This was a major injury.
Straight after surgery I could barely do anything with my leg. I was stuck on crutches. I was told to sleep in a machine for six to eight hours per day. The machine would slowly move my leg while I slept. It was weird. I found that the only position I could sleep in and not move at all was on my back. It was still quite a difficult task. I would strap myself in and the machine would go to work, slowly moving my leg around. It didn’t go particularly fast, but I struggled to sleep. Generally I would do two or three hours with it, take a break, then put it on again.
I spent the majority of my days on the couch, watching television and movies. I would do as much as I could with my leg, just to keep the movement going so that it didn’t stiffen up – pretty basic stuff. The aim was to get a full range of motion back within my knee joint. Then I had to build my quad muscle, hamstring muscle and calf back up to the level I needed for professional sport. The swelling prevented me from rushing anything. I had to get all of it out of the way before I could do too much of anything, and that took several months, because sometimes I got over-keen and pushed it a little too hard and it swelled up again. It was literally a case of two steps forward and one step back throughout the whole process.
At the time of my injury I had been really happy in Philadelphia. I was with a great set of team-mates doing what I loved to do – playing football – and getting paid to do it. It was my job. It was what I woke up to do every morning. And suddenly I couldn’t do that. Eventually I could get to training, but I couldn’t train as I wanted to, with my team-mates. Even worse, I had to be at the training ground earlier than the rest of the team so that I could start my rehabilitation work. I would see all the players getting ready for training and I would be laid out on the treatment table, barely able to move my leg.
Just going through my routine of stretching and trying to build my muscles up again with the trainer was tough enough. It was a frustrating task. I was putting in the hours but I wasn’t able to do what I was there to do. What I really wanted was to be out on the pitch getting that buzz from playing. I missed that so much.
The medical staff were absolutely great with me. There was never any suggestion from them that I wouldn’t make a full recovery. But if I’m honest, there was a little bit of doubt in my mind. I was willing to do anything that was required to get back to my best, but I knew it was going to be a long road. Still, I was dedicated enough, mentally, to try and get back as quickly as possible. I never once allowed myself to dwell on the thought that I wouldn’t make a successful return.
I set myself a personal goal: I aimed to be back running as soon as I could. It was a simple and straightforward goal, but it was in no way an easy one. The only way I was going to achieve it was by putting extra work in – two or three hours every day. Sometimes it was even more than that. I worked long, tedious hours with my trainer in an effort to get my leg back into some sort of shape.
It took about five and a half months, from start to finish, until I was running properly again; it was five months before I was running at all. Then I started to incorporate straight-line running into curved running. After a while I was able to run up to a cone, cut in and push off. It was a gradual process. It was also a boring process. But I desperately wanted to get back to playing football as soon as I could so that is what I had to do.
That first jog after months out felt absolutely great. Doing no exercise for such a long time is murderous for an athlete in any sport. It just felt great to be back. Once I got out on the pitch, I experienced another level of mood elevation. The team was still training without me, but at least I was there, jogging the length of the pitch at a slow pace. You get to appreciate the simple things in life at times like these. After so much time away it was a really positive feeling, psychologically, to be back out there with the girls, even though I was still essentially on my own.
After that, progress slowed again. I was told I couldn’t rush it through, and I knew that I couldn’t rush it through. You can’t do too much, too soon. I would go to the stadium and watch the Philadelphia games on crutches. That was tough to deal with mentally. One minute I was a big part of the team, the next I was out of the game and out of the team’s plans.
The team missed me, and my team-mates missed me. They told me so. And I hated missing out on it all. I hated being in the changing room before the game, sitting there by my locker, not being able to put my kit on and go out and play with them. They had their kits on and I was stuck with my crutches.
I began to miss my family again at this time. Don’t get me wrong, I had good friends at Philadelphia. But it’s a different deal when everybody is playing every weekend and you’re not. They were getting what they needed from the game, whereas I felt lost.
The Philadelphia players were great, actually, and they made me feel as much a part of things as they possibly could. There was one game when I was sitting on the bench when Marinette scored a great goal for us. She ran over to me and lifted her shirt to show me her vest underneath with my name and my number on it: Smith 8. I had tears in my eyes. Marinette and I had built up such a great partnership and understanding on the field and things had been going so well for us before my injury. She remains one of the best players I have ever played with. We had a connection on the pitch – I just knew where she was going to be and where her runs were going to go. So I knew with that sweet gesture that she was missing me on the field. I appreciated that so much because it showed me that she respected me and that she wanted to tell me. And, my God, I was missing so much playing with her too. That’s why the tears came.
But the bigger meaning of this was to remind me that I still mattered. By showing me her vest, Marinette made me realize that I was missed by the team and that I was still a big part of the team.
After a hard and intense summer programme of fitness and rehabilitation at Philadelphia, I was delighted to be named in the Charge team for the start of the 2003 season. I felt that it was going to be a big one for me. I was in really good shape, probably the fittest I had ever been in the US. I felt all was good to go for a successful third campaign with Philadelphia. Here was my opportunity to prove myself as the footballer I knew I could be in the best and biggest women’s football league in the world.
Depressingly, my season lasted for just one and a half matches.
During the second match of the campaign, against New York Power, I went up for a header with Shannon Boxx and as I came down she accidentally swiped at my knee. Again I heard a sound I didn’t want to hear. It was more of a ‘crunch’ than a ‘pop’ this time, but either way, I knew I had done something again. And I was right. It was the same knee too.
I immediately got a scan done, which revealed that I had meniscus damage – essentially a torn cartilage. More seriously, there was also bruising on the bone. The upshot of all this was that the damage was far more serious than had at first been expected.
A normal cartilage operation usually rules you out of action for five or six weeks maximum. I would be out of the game for another five months. This time the surgeon had to drill around the outside of my tibia a number of times, hopefully making it bleed so that calcium would re-grow and strengthen the bone.
The injuries now started to play on my mind. It seemed that I was working my butt off for no reward. What was the point? Fate was cruel. All these sorts of thoughts crowded into my head.
It was such a big blow for me. I had fought my way back from serious injury and lasted only one whole game before being ruled out for another season. I had scored in that game against New York as well. So I knew I was back and able to do what I’d done before the injury. It was frustrating and hurtful. I had done all the right things during recovery only to now have to do them all over again. It would be much harder for me second time around.
Away from injuries, some better news had come in the shape of the silver screen. Bend It Like Beckham was a big hit in the cinema. Featuring Keira Knightley, Parminder Nagra and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, it told the story of a young Punjabi Sikh from Hounslow in west London who has dreams of earning a football scholarship in America.
One of my goals for Philadelphia features in the film. It’s the goal I scored against San Diego Spirit on my WUSA debut, and it’s on screen for all of two or three seconds. There’s a commentary line in there too, mentioning my name. But blink and you’ll miss it!
It was really nice to be involved in something that did a lot to promote the women’s game, particularly in England, where I was still something of an unknown I felt. The film was popular in America too, probably because the storyline was about the girl getting a scholarship and having to leave home to better herself in America. It could have been written about me, come to think of it! But, in all seriousness, anything to do with women’s football getting coverage was good at that time, whether it was about someone going over to America or staying in England.
But when the film came out, in 2002, my focus was completely on getting back to playing on the pitch again. As I’ve said, an ACL injury is a bad injury – it used to end careers – and recovery is a long and slow process. And now I had reinjured the same knee shortly after getting back to full fitness.
This was going to take a lot out of me, both mentally and physically. I soon found out that I couldn’t do it on my own.