Football World Cup: Ryan Thomas in race against time after latest injury blow

Ryan Thomas has spent much of his decade-long All Whites career battling injuries.

Now, as New Zealand prepares for its first Football World Cup in 16 years, the midfielder is facing a race against the clock to make sure he is part of it.

A hamstring injury is set to sideline Thomas for the All Whites’ two warm-up matches in Florida, and has put a question mark over his involvement in the biggest tournament in his career.

The 31-year-old suffered the injury five weeks ago, while playing for PEC Zwolle in the Netherlands, landing him on managed minutes just at the time when he wanted to be pushing for a place in the All Whites match day squad.

While Thomas said he was “ahead of schedule” in his recovery, the New Zealand medical staff were still taking a cautious approach.

“At the moment there’s a lot of questions going on, how I’m going to do it and how we’re going to train.

“We’re just going to play it by ear. Luckily enough, I know my body well now, so if that is 30 minutes of training per day, then that’s 30 minutes of training.

“But we’re just going to take it day by day, and at the moment, it’s looking really good.”

Despite sitting out New Zealand’s heavy loss to Haiti in Fort Lauderdale on Wednesday, Thomas still felt the impact of the result.

“[We were] disappointed in ourselves, in each other, that we kind of let that slip away the way we did. It was definitely unnecessary, and with maybe a few changes, it wouldn’t have happened,” he said.

“But that’s definitely international football. The level of players and the level of teams here is a lot different to what we’re used to at, for instance, club level or for what we’ve been playing in friendly games over the last year or two.

“It’s a good test for us to see where we need to be going into the World Cup.”

The last time the All Whites had such a hefty 4-0 loss was in 2017 against Portugal, a game that Thomas played the full 90 minutes in.

In their next outing at the 2017 Confederations Cup exit, three months later, the All Whites rebounded with a 6-1 win over the Solomon Islands.

With a shorter turnaround between the Haiti loss and the next wam-up game against England on Sunday in Tampa, Thomas was not expecting a similiar bounce back in terms of scoreline from nine years ago against the world number four side but he did see the value in the playing group getting another chance to take the field so soon.

“You can try and work on what didn’t go well and capitalise on what did work well.

“But it’ll be an interesting one, obviously, playing against England, playing against some of the best players in the world it’s going to be a good challenge for us and hopefully we can put our best foot forward and put on a good performance.”

Games against England are rare for the All Whites, they last played in 1991 in New Zealand for two losses in five days for the hosts.

A match-up against a side ranked 81 places ahead of the New Zealanders would normally attract different attention but the placement before a World Cup meant that the All Whites needed one eye on the bigger prize.

“This is our last game before we play our first game against Iran in the World Cup, so we need to make sure we take this very seriously and especially after the last game, we want to make sure that we set that right and look forward to working on what we need to do to play in that first game against Iran.”

The switch from warm-up games and training camps to the World Cup proper would be a new environment for Thomas and 23 of his team mates who have never been the World Cup before.

“Hopefully going into that first game, we can just enjoy ourselves and seize the moment.”

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.