In the highly sanitised and carefully cultivated image-conscious modern world there are few professional athletes like Lisa De Vanna. Never afraid to speak her mind, the 34-year-old has had almost as many clubs as years spent as a professional footballer. Yet as she approaches the twilight of her playing career there’s a sense a more self-contented De Vanna has finally come to terms with her emotions.
Ahead of her first World Cup, De Vanna was described by her then coach Alistair Edwards as “high maintenance”, “a brat” and possessing mood swings “like the stock market crash of 1987”. It was a tempestuous relationship, and Edwards was not alone in having difficulties with De Vanna. But coaches around the world continued to persist for one simple reason: the lightning-quick forward was prodigiously talented.
An outsider who endured a challenging upbringing, De Vanna makes no apologies for her previous behaviour. “I was never a sheep when I was younger,” she tells Guardian Australia. “I’ve always been my own person. And if I didn’t like something I was quite happy to say, ‘nah, I’m leaving’. I didn’t feel any peer pressure because I had such a big strong personality.”
Yet there’s an increasingly reflective quality to De Vanna – as if finally she’s more assured of herself, and her place in the world. “I’m not the best communicator, I don’t know how to express my emotions. A lot of the time, I don’t understand how you can’t understand what I’m thinking. How can I see something as not good enough, and you don’t?”
A notorious perfectionist, the biggest source of De Vanna’s frustrations was a perceived lack of professionalism around her in an era when women’s football in Australia was moving from amateurism to semi-professionalism. One of the first to crack the professional women’s scene in the United States with Washington Freedom in 2009, De Vanna was caught between two worlds when returning to an Australian context that appeared light-years behind.
“I used to lose my mind about simple things,” she says. “I mean, how do you not want to work hard, how do you not want to play with pride? Because I was in that environment when I had the best in the world, with Abby Wambach and Sonia Bompastor – these legends of the game – and they drilled it into my head, to be the best you have to train the best.
“In the past [other Matildas] didn’t care – but I cared. So then I’m the one blowing up because I wanted the best for myself, I wanted the best for my team and I expected better from my teammates.”
Part of De Vanna’s frustrations arose from the challenges she overcame to represent the national team, not least financial hardship. From buying her first pairs of shoes, second-hand for $3, to working at petrol stations around a busy schedule of private training to top up the teams’ preparations ahead of her first World Cup, De Vanna has had it tough.
“I missed most of my teenage years, I gave up everything for football, but the good thing was I had good people around me. My friends who were going out partying turned around and said, ‘nup, go home’. They never got me involved in that environment because they knew from the way I talked about football that this was something I always wanted.”
And with the game around her professionalising rapidly, De Vanna now feels more in step with her surroundings. “We’ve just had a conversation about ‘developing a winning mentality’,” she says. “I’ve had that winning mentality. I was like that 10 years ago but I got in trouble for it – and now I was turning away from that because my whole life I was told that it’s not acceptable to blow up!”
Twice removed from the Matildas set up for behavioural issues, De Vanna has overcome every obstacle set in her path, and now stands on the cusp of becoming Australia’s most-capped footballer, surpassing Matildas legend Cheryl Salisbury’s mark of 151 appearances.
Approaching her fourth World Cup, and with the chance to join an elite club of players to have scored at all four, De Vanna now finds her role changing – less an impassioned motivator of her fellow players and more of a mentor for the next generation.
“Ellie [Carpenter] might get a little bit cheeky, but she’s also young – she hasn’t been in the game long enough to understand the maturity of it,” De Vanna says. “Mary Fowler, she goes and plays NPL and scores six, seven goals, has this confidence, goes and plays young Matildas, kills it, but now she’s in an environment that’s a little tense – it’s high pressure, and she’s now realising, ‘wow, I need to up my game’.
“In terms of mindset she’s such a humble kid, who just purely wants to do great things … But it’s been a good wake-up call for her as well. A couple of weeks ago we were doing sprints and I said ‘I’ll go with Mary’ and I made sure I beat her on every single one just to bring her back down to earth a little bit.”
A strong adherent to what she calls “old school” ways, De Vanna also wants to imbue the next generation with traditional values: work hard, train hard, never let your passion for the game be distracted.
“Everything’s so superficial now – it’s all about social media, and I don’t like that. I think you have to have a little old school in there. Everyone’s looking for acceptance and approval from people they don’t know, and I just feel like you have to be happy within yourself. If you start letting people who don’t know you make opinions about yourself then you’ll never be successful.”
Despite her stellar career, it’s been a frustrating few years both on and off the pitch for De Vanna, who for the first time in her career failed to score a single goal during an injury-ravaged W-League season with Sydney FC. But the belief of new coach Ante Milicic in backing the veteran star has helped lift the mercurial striker.
“Just how I’m feeling at the moment, I think my mindset is probably the best it’s been in the last few years, and I know it’s probably my last one so there’s nothing to lose really, is there?
“I just want to walk off the field knowing I’ve given it everything; and I’m happy because the last 10-15 years of football have been stressful because I’ve expected so much. But now I don’t feel like that.”
