Poms, put aside your Ouija boards – Australians do have common sense about Sam Kerr

A sports columnist for the most respected Telegraph newspaper in London has jumped into the Sam Kerr debate without independent research, original thought or any particular insights. We applaud him for that.

When a columnist can bang out a few hundred words before morning tea and get paid handsomely for it, it is a win for the craft.

Credit: Illustration: Matt Davidson

That is why I plan to do the exact same thing right here.

Mr Oliver Brown, award-winning chief sports writer for The Telegraph, says Matildas captain Sam Kerr’s court defence that she felt the victim of white privilege while being interviewed in a London police station is nonsense, and he may well be right.

He points out the accurate and entirely irrelevant fact that Kerr earns somewhere in the range of 10 times the wage of the constable she was abusing.

As we know, Kerr was full of booze and bad manners in a London police station and at first refused to pay compensation to a cabbie after she threw up in his vehicle. She also called a policeman stupid and white.

Sam Kerr and fiancee Kristie Mewis (second from left) outside court this month.Credit: Getty Images

“Kerr’s demeanour in these exchanges was that of an obnoxious drunk. She belittled and condescended to PC Stephen Lovell, repeatedly threatening to engage ‘the Chelsea lawyers’ (good luck with that at 3.15am). The post-hoc rationalisation, though, was that she was merely reacting to the two policemen’s perceived privilege over her,” he accurately observes.

If he had stopped there and headed to the tea trolley, all would have been well, but as he was still a couple of hundred words short he made the leap from analysis to cliche, suggesting the Australian sports-mad public simply ignored Kerr’s poor behaviour because she could kick a few goals for the national soccer side.

“Now that she has been cleared, she is broadly celebrated in Australia as an avenging angel, a woman whose dogged spirit has brought humiliation on those delicate-flower Poms.

“Such is the reverence she attracts in her homeland, you sense the wagons would have circled around her regardless of the outcome.” The outcome, by the way, was she was acquitted.

To use the term “you sense” is media shorthand for having no facts to back an argument. It is Ouija-board journalism.

The facts are that Kerr’s behaviour has been widely condemned by the public, who are embarrassed by her entitled, petulant manner. If Oliver had put down his jam roly-poly and bothered to engage in any basic research, he would have seen the vast majority of comments on dozens of Kerr stories proves this and destroys the Brown Doctrine of Idiocy. But playing to the stereotype is much easier; it is the equivalent of suggesting all Fleet Street journalists are opportunistic phone-tapping bilge rats.

Still short of words and desperate for a donut, Mr Brown then decides to attack this columnist for his piece on Kerr: “‘Let’s be clear,’ ran one cri de coeur from Down Under this week” – that’s me! – “‘This case is the biggest attack on an Australian sports star from the mother country since Bodyline.’ If this thesis were not overwrought enough, it then segued into a skit entitled The Ballad of Samantha Kerr. To quote one couplet: ‘The cops go again – this time with the race card / When you get lippy with Scotland Yard, we’ll go twice as hard.’ It is fair to say Bob Dylan does not have much to worry about.”

Again, he is right. Bob Dylan – indeed, Bob the Builder – has nothing to worry about.

Apparently cri de coeur is French for “a cry from the heart; heartfelt or sincere appeal”. In his article, the multilingual columnist also manages to deploy misogynoir, polemic, portmanteau and prima facie, proving (at least to himself) that he is very clever, but in doing so, fails the first rule of journalism – use language that is readily understandable.

But you are picking on the wrong reporter here, Browny, as I too studied French.

Granted, I received the lowest possible mark of E in form two at Preston East High, with the teacher writing, “John’s results reflect his apparent lack of interest in the French language.” Tough, but fair.

Silvester’s form two French results.Credit: Naked City historical archives

To fraudulently support his argument that Australians are all behind Kerr, he suggests the song was a serious defence of her behaviour. It was marked “tongue in cheek” and was clearly satire (from the Latin satura) and pure hyperbole (from the Greek hyperbola).

But rather than defend Kerr’s rant in the police station, I wrote that she had thrown “an alcohol-fuelled tantrum”.

In fact, one of the verses of the Ballad of Samantha Kerr is:

Vodka shots ring out in the barroom night

Enter Sam Kerr and she’s pretty tight

She’s in the back seat, and she’s just been ill

The cabbie says, “Oh, my God, just pay the bill.”

Mr Brown will certainly hate the B-side on Victoria’s bail system.

In his rush to portray Australians as uncritical sports groupies, Brown loses the plot and misses the point. We agree Kerr was insulting, but did her remarks justify a protracted trial? Was she treated differently because of her profile? Why was she charged with a race-related offence when prosecutors initially knocked back the case; why was it heard in the serious Crown Court, and why was an expensive King’s Counsel hired to prosecute, contrary to the Crown Prosecution Service’s own guidelines?

England rejoices in 2005. Rolling drunk cricketing role models.Credit: AP

Brown suggests not only do we hero-worship our sports stars, we pick ones who aren’t very good. “Kerr was relatively little known outside of Australia, where 69 international goals had helped elevate her to the status of a minor deity.” (From the Latin word deus, meaning god.)

Would it be churlish to point out that the 2005 English Ashes-winning side received, while heroically drunk, an open bus tour of London cheered on by adoring crowds, followed by a trip to Number 10 Downing Street to visit the prime minister, where one star pissed in the garden and they received MBEs and OBEs from the Queen on behalf of a grateful nation?

To Mr Brown, we retort :“Mettez ca dans votre pipe et fumez-le.” Stick that in your pipe and smoke it. (Thank you, Google translate.)

The razor-sharp prosecutor William Emlyn Jones, KC, told the jury calling a white man “white” was “plainly not as loaded” as calling a black man “black”. And the jury in the Kerr case seemed to agree that being called stupid and white did not reach the threshold of racial harassment.

Mr Oliver Brown should stick to covering courts such as tennis, badminton and basketball – or even Margaret Court – and leave matters in the Crown Court to those who have the remotest interest in the criminal justice system.

Rather than end with the bickering of two white, privileged columnists in need of a digestive biscuit, (“irony”, from the Greek, eironeia) we refer to someone who understands the issues (and Latin) – the eminent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, AO, KC, respected both in Britain and Australia, who wrote of the Kerr case.

“What will surprise most London lawyers was that this was ever brought to trial ... The law was passed to deter explosions of racist violence in cities; it should not have been used to punish a silly insult by an angry detainee, uttered in a police station. Law enforcers have a duty to act proportionately; their attack on Sam Kerr has been an attempt to break a butterfly on a wheel.”

Tea, anyone?

John Silvester is a regular columnist.

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