Davide Somma interview: How injury brought a promising Leeds United career to a premature end

“I was lucky”, he said, in a sport which likes to talk about players making their own.

That luck ran out amid a litany of injuries which forced a natural, accomplished finisher - a centre-forward who Chris Sutton once said could score “with either foot and from any range” - towards retirement before he was 30.

Somma’s lasting popularity in Leeds disguises his brief involvement there, reflecting the fact that most who saw him appreciated the promise he had.

He spoke this week on the YEP’s Inside Elland Road podcast, recalling the peaks of his goalscoring at Elland Road but detailing the chronic pain in one knee which led to nine operations before he accepted that he would never play again.

As a professional he last kicked a ball in April 2013, at the age of 28, and recently signed up to an over-30s league in Long Island, USA where he works as a youth-team coach.

“If I play an indoor game I need two or three days of recovery,” he said.

Somma’s reputation for finishing was well founded and he left Leeds with 12 goals from 13 league starts, all but one of them scored in the 2010-11 season which ranks as the best of his career.

His game was about impact: two strikes on his debut as a substitute against Millwall in 2010, another less than 60 seconds after coming off the bench at Portsmouth and a sublime volley with his first touch in a rousing 2-2 draw with Norwich City in February 2011.

Sutton, who coached Somma on loan at Lincoln City, could not speak highly enough of him.

The following summer, Somma was taking part in a pre-season practice match at Thorp Arch when Patrick Kisnorbo fell accidentally on his leg. He needed surgery on a ruptured ACL and was ruled out for six months.

Somma sees it as the beginning of the end for him, an injury with side-effects he could never recover from.

“I couldn’t come back from it,” he said.

“I’d had my right ACL done in Italy with Perugia, the same kind of thing, but I’d recovered from that so I tried to think positive. But it was more than that. It was right behind my knee cap, a weight-bearing surface, and it (the ACL) kept touching it. It never had time to heel so it was a fighting battle.”

By the time Somma was at the stage of thinking about a comeback, midway through the 2011-12 term, Leeds as a club had changed.

Simon Grayson, the manager who signed him, had been sacked and replaced by Neil Warnock. Warnock rated Somma and Somma, whose form in his first full season had earned him a maiden cap with South Africa, was motivated to work through the pain.

“Neil Warnock really liked me so I was trying to push through it,” he said. “I was going to London to see a specialist almost two or three times a week sometimes. Then I’d come back and train once a week.

“I felt like that season was going to be the season where I’d be a starter and get my career underway but I got an infection in my knee and I had six or seven operations.”

Somma suffered another knee injury in early 2012, in training again, and went almost 18 months without appearing in a single first team fixture.

Warnock brought him back into the fold around Christmas of that year and started a clearly unfit Somma in a 2-0 defeat away at Hull City. Somma was substituted at half-time and would play only three more times before leaving the club.

“I was nowhere near ready,” he said.

“I don’t know if they saw something in training that they liked but I didn’t have confidence and I didn’t have the games under the belt. I was always thinking about my knee and I had pain in my knee with every movement I did. You’ve got to have a clear head when you play.

“The amount of medication I was on, it wasn’t healthy. I couldn’t even train. I was training literally on my own with the physios, not even with the team. It wasn’t a healthy situation.”

Warnock was dismissed before the end of the 2012-13 season, bringing Brian McDermott to Leeds, but Somma’s contract was about to end and the club were not inclined to extend it; even less so after McDermott fielded the striker in a 1-0 win over Burnley in April 2013.

Somma’s outing, his last for Leeds was marred by torn cartilage, summing up his misfortune over two hard years,“I wanted to go on for another year but they couldn’t gamble on me. They couldn’t gamble on someone who was playing here and there.”

A few months later he reappeared at Leeds, invited back by McDermott to work on his fitness, but could feel himself fighting a losing battle.

“There’s got to be some way I can get back on the field, my career just can’t end like this - that was my thought the entire time,” Somma said. “But it got worse and worse. I couldn’t go 100 per cent and I wasn’t ready at all. I was done.”

Somma describes himself as “hard-headed” and, because of that attitude, he underwent more surgery after returning to America and took up a trial with MLS club New York Red Bulls in 2017.

No contract was offered to him and Somma accepted his fate. “That was my time,” he said. “I’d given the game everything I could.”

His goals at Leeds are still crystal clear in his head: the cross from Sanchez Watt which dropped to him perfectly and set the ball rolling on a hot summer’s day against Millwall, the volley against Norwich which was, without question, the best of his finishes.

The crowd warmed to him and Somma came to epitomise lost potential, through no fault of his own.

Does he feel bitter about the way his body let him down?

“Honestly, the playing and the experience - it surpasses my injuries,” he said. “I had the best time and I’m honoured to have been a Leeds United player.

“Injuries are part of the game but to play for Leeds United, not many people can say that. It’s one of the best clubs you could ever play for.”