Dominic Johns: From Injury to Captaincy at HKFC Soccer Sevens
Two years ago, Dominic Johns stood on the touchline at the HKFC Standard Chartered Soccer Sevens with his right leg in pieces and his future in even smaller ones.
He had broken the tibia and fibula a fortnight earlier, a heavy tackle from North District’s Ho Chun-ho leaving the nippy Football Club forward facing surgery, uncertainty and a silence in his career he never saw coming. The first operation failed. The damage ran deeper than the scans had suggested, and the fix simply did not hold.
What followed was not just a lay-off. It was an ordeal.
A second procedure was needed to remove a metal rod and probe fresh complications. Then came the infection. For three or four months, Johns lived on antibiotics, his leg “hanging floppy”, his days shaped by painkillers and guesswork rather than training schedules and team meetings. The game that had always given him structure suddenly offered none at all.
By November 2024, he was back in Sydney for another operation, a major step on what would become a long, jagged road to recovery. The physical damage could be measured in scans and scars. The mental toll was harder to chart.
He calls it “a pretty big mental struggle”. That undersells it. For most of the first 18 months, he could not even map out his rehab. Every time he tried to look ahead, something else went wrong. A setback here, a complication there. Plans scrapped, hope delayed.
Two years on, the contrast could hardly be sharper.
The frustrated, uncomfortable spectator who watched the 2024 tournament from the sidelines, and who returned in 2025 in a very different role producing digital content, will walk out this weekend as captain of Football Club at the same sevens he once viewed through gritted teeth.
“It’s third time lucky,” he said. The phrase carries the weight of those lost months. This is not a routine comeback; it is the product of countless restarts, of rehab plans torn up and rewritten, of days when progress meant simply getting through without another scare.
Just when the story seemed to be turning, the game reminded him how fragile it all was. Early this season, in what should have been a routine friendly, Johns took another blow to the same leg. The pain cut both ways. Physically, it jolted a limb that had already endured enough. Mentally, it dragged him back to the moment of the original break, to the stretcher, the surgery, the infection, the uncertainty.
Yet he is still here. Still playing. Now leading.
This weekend, when he pulls on the captain’s armband at the HKFC Standard Chartered Soccer Sevens, Johns will not just be fronting a side. He will be closing a circle that began with a shattered leg and a career on pause, and stepping into a tournament that once symbolised everything he thought he might lose.
