Tottenham Hotspur Women’s Jess Naz went down against Aston Villa midway through the second half. You always fear the worst when a player goes down like that under no contact, especially when she’s later
stretchered off. Spurs confirmed a right ACL rupture today and shared that Jess will undergo surgery followed by rehabilitation.
I hate how many times I’ve had to write this kind of thing (even one would be too many), but this really sucks. It’s devastating for Jess, who has had a really tough year personally. It’s also a huge shame for the team as Jess was starting to look quite dangerous down the right wing in combination with Olivia Holdt and Ash Neville.
“At the start of the year, I was at rock bottom and through therapy, I came out better,” Jess wrote in the Instagram post about her ACL tear. Jess also faced racist abuse from fans online earlier this season. It doesn’t seem fair that she should now also have to go through the long and grueling process of ACL rehab.
Like Maite Oroz, Ella Morris and Kit Graham before her, this is Jess’ second ACL tear (the first was her left knee in 2019). This is, unfortunately, all too common – tearing one ACL puts your other ACL at a higher risk for re-tear. The only silver lining I can think of is that this time around, the club should have a lot more resources at Jess’ disposal to make sure recovery and rehab go as well as possible.
At this point, I assume you all know how horribly frequent ACL tears are in women’s football. If you don’t, I think the official numbers are something like 2-8x more likely than in men’s football. Researchers have tried to attribute this to everything from physiology and hormonal cycles to differences in resources between men’s and women’s football (i.e. poor or nonexistent medical and sports science personnel, suboptimal schedules, and worse pitches to name just a few). These research efforts are ongoing and have been for a long time, but this clearly hasn’t manifested in any concrete efforts or improvements yet. I am, as always, hoping for answers and action on this front.
In the meantime, here’s wishing Jess all the best in her surgery and recovery, and sending lots of love and strength.
