“My smile says it all,” Jess Ziu beams, and much as the gathered press would love to believe it was the sight of them again that had her chuffed, it was a bit more to do with her return to the international squad for the first time since winning her 18th cap in July last year.
There’s no end of Irish players who’ve been through the mill in recent years with injuries, but Ziu has suffered like few others. Two anterior cruciate ligament injuries – the first sustained in October 2022, the second in August 2024 – left the Finglas native sidelined for two of the last three years.
Through it all, there was no shortage of Irish team-mates to lean on for advice; Aoife Mannion, Kyra Carusa and Chloe Mustaki among those to have been through the same ordeal. And Lily Agg, who lives in Bristol where Ziu is now playing her football during a loan spell with Bristol City, is the middle of her rehab from the injury. “I’m around with her a lot, speaking about knees,” Ziu laughs.
Jamie Finn is back in the squad too having recovered from tearing her ACL in February last year, but she is further along the road to match fitness, Ziu having played just 112 minutes for Bristol so far this season.
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A video made by West Ham, ‘Jess Ziu – Road 2 Recovery’, gives a flavour of the work she had to put in to get back from what she says was a more testing injury this time around, but rather than letting the second one crush her spirits, she used her experience from the first to get through it.
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“I remember just sitting on my bed and crying, I didn’t want to tell any of my family. But I got straight on to it, I ordered ankle weights that night just to get my leg straight, I knew the plan.”
“I think the first one made me really resilient so when the second one came, I just got on with it,” she says. “And I learned that there’s more to life than just football, I tried to enjoy life a little more, to be more sociable, whereas maybe first time I kept more to myself. I remember thinking, I want to win games, I’m very competitive, but ultimately being able to walk off the pitch on my two legs is also a win for me.”
Just as Finn talked about earlier in the week, Ziu has been struck by the absence of so many familiar faces on her return. “The old gang is gone,” she says of the retirees. “I was sitting at lunch today thinking, I missed a lot because of my knee. I missed Louise [Quinn], [Niamh] Fahey, Diane [Caldwell], Megan Campbell. A lot of big moments. I didn’t even get to say goodbye to any of them, which is quite sad.”
“It’s funny, I don’t know if I’m considered a young player – I’ve been around the national team for seven years now,” she laughs. That should probably be moving her in to veteran territory, but she was just 16 when she made her senior debut and only four of this 24-strong squad are younger than her – Katie Keane, Jessie Stapleton, Abbie Larkin and Emily Murphy.
Whether these games have come too soon for her to have any lengthy involvement remains to be seen, but in the long-run her versatility can be no small help to head coach Carla Ward – who Ziu only met for the first time on Monday.
A certainty, though, is that one of her West Ham housemates won’t be cheering Ireland on over the two legs of the Nations League play-off against Belgium – but that’s only because she’s likely to feature in the Belgian defence. “And me and Amber [Tysiak] are really close, I still have my room in the house and I’ll drop by every now and then. She’s probably my best friend over there.”
One final question. Which knee did you injure?
“The right one was the first, the left the second. I have no more knees to give.”
