ORLANDO—When a player wishes he'd have broken his leg rather than endure an lingering injury nightmare, it has not been a good year.
One could forgive Tony Cascio – who has yet to play this season after missing most of 2014 due to injury – if he thinks the soccer gods are a cruel bunch.
Yet Orlando City SC’s “forgotten” midfielder is back in full training, and actually made the bench as an unused sub last Saturday at New England. Cascio's return has him feeling like “the new kid on the block” more than eight months after he was the team’s second pick in last December’s MLS Expansion Draft.
It has been a tough road for the 25-year-old former Colorado and Houston player, with only one full MLS season to his credit since joining the league in 2012, following a stellar college career at UConn.
Cascio had only just come back from ACL surgery at the end of the 2014 campaign when the Lions claimed the Dynamo player for valuable midfield depth on their inexperienced squad.
He appeared on the Lions’ bench three times in March before feeling a nagging pain in his back. As Cascio tried to push through the injury in training, his left leg went completely numb, starting a five-month ordeal during which he paraded through the offices of specialists, chiropractors and physiotherapists – none of whom could identify the root of the problem.
“It has been a tough and frustrating process,” Cascio said. “For the first couple of months, I went into training with a positive attitude, thinking every day that I would come back from it. But it just didn’t stop hurting.
“Eventually, I had an MRI and it came back as a disk herniation, where the back fuses the spine to the hinge part. Basically, they were just seeing a lot of inflammation in there, so I started doing my own research and it seems that, after my knee surgery, it actually threw my back out a little as I tended to limp on one side.”
Cascio became his own health advocate, studying online to discover as much as he could about the disk problem and affected areas.
“They say the body is a circuit,” Cascio explained. “Well, my circuit went out. Whether I didn’t rehab properly or whether it was a series of things, it just got worse and worse and I felt like I had to give myself the best chance of coming back.
“I was getting heat treatment and stretching, seeing the specialists, but no one really had an absolute answer, there was no one real solution. I have done a lot of back exercises to strengthen the core around it, though, and it is a lot better. I can still feel it but the pain is manageable now.”
If there was a danger Cascio could end up as Orlando’s invisible man, it wouldn’t have been due to lack of effort. Cascio was keen to point out he has been working as hard as possible to get back on the field, especially as he is in the final year of his current contract.
“Mentally, it has been tough,” he added. “I wanted to come in and train normally. And I knew it would get better eventually, but nobody could really give me a timescale, and that was the hardest part. In some ways, it would have been better if I had broken my leg: you know how to come back from that and how long it takes.
“I have worked out a lot on the bike – Lance Armstrong would be proud of me! And there were other exercises I could do without feeling it in my back: pull-ups and push-ups, that kind of thing. But I really just wanted to get out there and prove I can still play.”
While stuck on the sidelines, Cascio has witnessed the team struggle to stabilize the very position at which he is most suited to help.
Through injuries, suspensions and international call-ups, Orlando has tried no less than nine different wide midfielders this year, with Cascio forced to sit and watch the personnel carousel.
“I don’t necessarily look at myself as a starter per se,” Cascio said. “But I definitely feel like I can come on and make a positive contribution. My ideal role is the outside mid positions and I have the ideal body type for them. I can do all the running you need – it is just a matter of getting in the positions at the right times.
“For the longest time this year, I didn’t feel a part of the team. But it’s great to be back again. The other guys are still pushing me and it’s almost like I have never been away. Now I just want the chance to show myself, and the team and the fans, that I can still do well at this level. It is just about playing soccer, and I love to play.”
