He had barely had time to take his boots off and hang them up before Mohamed Touré was taking them off again, this time under very different circumstances. The 21-year-old Socceroos striker, who had lit up the English Championship with a blistering start at Norwich City, limped out of a match against Sheffield Wednesday after just nine minutes last week, leaving a packed Carrow Road in collective dismay.
Norwich confirmed on Friday that Touré is dealing with a groin muscle injury and faces four to six weeks on the sidelines. The timing is brutal. Australia's two World Cup send-off friendlies, against Cameroon in Sydney on March 27 and Curacao in Melbourne four days later, will almost certainly come and go without him.
Norwich boss Philippe Clement, himself managing a mounting injury crisis at the Championship club, did not dress it up when speaking to reporters. "He has a muscle injury," Clement said. "He will be out four to six weeks. It's a disappointing one, of course, because it's also one nobody saw coming so fast in the game. He was in full speed and then in a duel out of balance, so it's really unlucky, and we need to move on."
The Belgian coach's frustration is understandable. Touré had arrived at Carrow Road and immediately looked like a player who belonged at a higher level. In just three matches, he scored five goals including a hat-trick, becoming the first Norwich player in 117 years to achieve that feat in the opening games of his career for the club. The numbers don't do it justice, either. He was fast, direct, and genuinely dangerous every time he touched the ball.
For Socceroos manager Tony Popovic, the news adds to an already significant headache. Australia's injury list heading into the June tournament reads more like a physiotherapy waiting room than a football squad: Lewis Miller, Harry Souttar, Craig Goodwin, Connor Metcalfe, Hayden Matthews, Noah Botic, and Cammy Devlin have all been carrying concerns. Touré's absence from the warm-up matches won't derail the World Cup campaign, but it does deny Popovic a chance to integrate his most exciting young forward in a competitive match environment ahead of the tournament, as reported by ABC News.
The silver lining, and it is a genuine one, is that a four-to-six week timeline puts Touré back in action well before the World Cup kicks off in June. There is every reason to believe he will be fit and firing when it matters most. On Instagram, Touré himself called it a "minor setback" and promised he would return "stronger and better." Given what supporters have already seen from him, that prospect alone is worth getting excited about.
Norwich are also feeling the squeeze. With 13 players currently unavailable, the club faces a delicate run of fixtures, including a glamour FA Cup fifth-round tie against Premier League side Leeds. They will miss Touré's goals badly in the weeks ahead.
For Australian football fans, though, the bigger picture remains encouraging. The Socceroos are heading to a World Cup hosted across the United States, Canada, and Mexico with a squad that includes genuine quality across the park. Touré's emergence this season has been one of the more thrilling storylines in Australian football in years, and a groin injury, frustrating as it is, does not change the trajectory of what promises to be a significant tournament campaign.
The kind of form Touré showed in those early Norwich matches is not the sort that switches off overnight. When he pulls on the green and gold in June, the expectation will be sky-high. And from everything we have seen so far, he looks more than ready to meet it.