Sam Kerr’s tone slightly shifted. She hadn’t, she mentioned, had time to consider it but. She had put it to the again of her thoughts. She had different issues on which to focal point her consideration.
Her reaction muted to the purpose of deadpan, Kerr gave the distinct influence that the be offering, to a few the be offering of an entire life, was once simply any other bullet level on a hectic time table, any other merchandise on her to-do checklist: Barcelona at the highway. Liverpool within the league. Westminster Abbey, to behave as Australia’s flag-bearer on the coronation of King Charles III. To set up Everton away.
Of path, she mentioned, she was once mindful that being handpicked by way of Australia’s top minister to hold her nation’s flag on the coronation was once an “amazing, amazing honor.” It would, she stated, almost definitely be such a factor she would “tell my kids about in 10 or 15 years.”
It was once simply that the speculation of it did not faze her. Indeed, such was once her insouciance that she admitted that her first intuition when presented the position was once to show it down. She concept she was once too busy to wait a coronation. She assumed she would have a coaching consultation that day. She did not need to leave out coaching merely to hold a flag.
Those that know her, although, would provide a supplementary rationalization. Kerr has lengthy been considered most likely the best participant in ladies’s football. She was once, for a time, the highest-paid feminine participant on the earth.
Her teammates, colleagues and pals are unanimous in announcing that not anything that standing has introduced—the profile, the cash, the attendant force—has left the slightest mark on her. “She comes across as real chill,” mentioned her Australia teammate Mary Fowler. “For any of the pressure that I may feel, it’s multiplied for her. So I’m just like: Props to her for being able to deal with that and come across as if it doesn’t affect her.”
That, she said, is just who Kerr is. It is also exactly who Australia needs her to be this month as she prepares to carry her country on her shoulders once again at the Women’s World Cup. (The start of her World Cup, though, will have to wait: On Thursday, Kerr was ruled out for at least the first two games with a calf injury,
At 29, Kerr has been a superstar for some time. Four years ago, when Chelsea was preparing its bid to sign him, the club’s management had to present a case for the investment. Both the fee to acquire her services and her salary were, at the time, substantial commitments by the standards of women’s soccer.
Their case was that the money was dwarfed by its marketability. Kerr was, by that stage, the face of the sportswear manufacturer Nike in Australia. The possibility of her signing was a driving force in the decision by Optus Sport, the Australian broadcaster, to acquire the rights to the Women’s Super League in England. Chelsea’s board was told not to consider the idea that Kerr was expensive, but to see her signing as a bargain.
This summer has borne that out. Kerr is the undisputed star, the main event, the central character of not only the biggest Women’s World Cup in history, but a World Cup that Australia desperately hopes to win on home soil.
Her image has been plastered across the country. She is front and center in all of the tournament’s marketing campaigns. She has been depicted, alongside Princess Leia and John Lennon, in a mural in the hip Sydney suburb of Marrickville, and she is on the cover of an updated edition of the FIFA video game. She has published an autobiography. She is, as her former teammate Kate Gill put it, the “poster person for the team.”
Seemingly every major news outlet has carried an account of her upbringing in Fremantle, just outside Perth, in Western Australia, detailing her family’s rich sporting background — both her father and brother played Australian Rules Football professionally — and her rise to prominence in a sport that she and her family initially “hated.”
“She is everywhere here,” mentioned Jon Marquard, the tv and media govt who pieced in combination that Optus deal. “If there is an icon of this World Cup, it’s her. The position she is in is actually a pretty unusual thing. In terms of universal respect, I can’t think of anyone who is on a par with her.”
Her sporting peers in Australia, instead, skew toward the historical, those whose legacies have been burnished just a little by time: the runner Cathy Freeman, the swimmer Ian Thorpe, the tennis player Ashleigh Barty. Her current peers, even in the traditional national sports cricket, both codes of rugby and the AFL, do not compare.
In a nation as consumed by sports as Australia—”sport to many Australians is life, and the rest a shadow,” as the essayist and thinker Donald Horne put it in 1964—that is a considerable honour. Marquard puts that broad popularity down not only to Kerr’s achievements, particularly outside Australia, but to her nature.
“We have historically had a bit of tall poppy syndrome,” he mentioned, regarding a scenario the place an individual’s good fortune reasons them to be resented or criticized. “There is a cultural ethos in Australia most often of now not getting above your self. Anyone who does now not has a tendency to be observed as unique, and that’s central to the tradition.
“You can admire what anyone like Nick Kyrgios has executed, however he can also be moderately divisive. Whereas Sam has none of that hubris. She’s observed as authentic. The complete workforce is, in reality: You see them spending ages talking to fanatics after video games. Even with the entire calls for on her, Sam has stayed moderately grounded. It’s moderately exceptional.”
Steph Catley, a defender for Australia, put it rather more succinctly in comments to The Sydney Morning Herald. “She’s available in the market,” she said. “She’s very just like: ‘Blah. I’m Sam. This is me. She’s still like that.”
That way, slightly than being intimidated by way of her standing — and the expectancy now heaped on her shoulders — Kerr turns out now not best to welcome it, however to inspire it. She has spoken, semi-regularly, of her hopes for this event and what it’s going to supply her — and supply ladies’s football in Australia — with what she phrases a “Cathy Freeman moment,” a connection with the runner’s iconic victory within the 400 meters on the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.
Guiding Australia to a World Cup win in the similar stadium, Kerr has urged, would have a lot the similar have an effect on on a next technology of Australians.
“If the pressure’s not there, it probably means it’s not that big of a game to be honest,” she mentioned this month. “Pressure is a privilege, and I like force. I like being in a second the place one or two moments can exchange the trail of your profession, in reality, and I feel this World Cup is a kind of moments.”
By the time Kerr allowed herself to think about her exact role at Westminster Abbey in May, she admitted that she did get just a little nervous. All she had to do was walk a few paces in front of the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, but she had to do it with the Australian flag on her shoulder and the eyes of the world upon her.
That was the first coronation she attended this year. Her hope is that there will be another, and one in which she will have a significantly more prominent role. The difference is that this time she is not nervous at all.