Smeltz to miss start of season
Shane Smeltz will miss the start of the A-League season but is confident he will be back to his very best for both Perth Glory and New Zealand during the 2013-2014 campaign.
Shane Smeltz will miss the start of the A-League season but is confident he will be back to his very best for both Perth Glory and New Zealand during the 2013-2014 campaign.
The Hyundai A-League's all-time leading goalscorer was forced to undergo a hip operation last month, surgery he felt was absolutely essential in order to remedy a nagging problem that had hindered him for over a year.
"It had been an issue for me in terms of both playing and training for around twelve months," he explained. "Basically ever since I was away at the London Olympics with New Zealand last off-season.
"That was a really busy period for me and that was when I first noticed that I had an issue with the hip and the groin all down the one side.
"It never really went away and I ended up carrying it all last season.
"I was just managing it and getting through, but worrying about your body week-to- week is obviously not good for your game.
"It got to a stage last season where I had to have a couple of cortisone injections and we never really put our finger on exactly what was causing the problem.
"We didn't really find that out until I came back here for pre-season and obviously that was a shame because if we'd identified it earlier, I could have had my surgery earlier and I'd be further along with my recovery than I am now.
"But the positive to come out of it is that we did find out what I needed doing, I got the operation done nice and quickly and two, two-and-a-half weeks later, I'm feeling a lot better.
"The groin pain has gone, now it's just a question of time and making sure that I do my rehab properly and the surgeon said that he's pretty confident that I'll get some really good results from it."
While understandably reluctant to pinpoint a specific date for his return to competitive action, the 31-year-old is clearly chomping at the bit to get back to finding the net for both club and country.
New Zealand face a November play-off against the fourth-placed side from the CONCACAF region in order to book a place at next year's World Cup and Smeltz would love to help put the All Whites in a position to repeat the heroics they produced in South Africa back in 2010.
"I've got a time-frame of when to start running and when to start playing again and I've just got to stick to that now," he said.
"I'll be doing everything I can from now on in terms of rehab to be ready as soon as I can, but it's difficult at this stage to put an exact time frame on it.
"This could be a massive season and that's another reason why I decided to get this operation done.
"I didn't want to go through another season of battling through week-to-week and the surgeon said that once I recover, I'll be feeling as good as ever. Obviously that's what I want.
"We've got an All Whites camp in September which unfortunately I won't have much involvement with, but I'll certainly be having a chat with (All Whites coach) Ricki Herbert around that time as we look towards that massive World Cup play-off against Honduras or Panama or whoever it might be."