’I’m a bit of a rat bag’: Matildas star Sam Kerr still the cheeky kid

A television on the wall plays coverage of the US midterm elections. Sam Kerr loves this stuff.

Matildas star Sam Kerr in Sydney this week for the game against Chile. Picture: Hollie Adams

A television on the wall plays coverage of the US midterm elections. Sam Kerr loves this stuff. Her cop shows. Her murder mysteries. Her private investigations. Her politics. She’s a news junkie. Donald Trump appears on the screen. Whaddya reckon? “He has no respect for women,” she says. “I think he’s racist. He constantly contradicts himself. Thank God I’m Australian. I think he’s trash.”

I’m expecting to meet a polished young woman. She’s better. Mischievous. Opinionated. Self-deprecating. Fiercely independent. “A bit of a rat bag,” she tells The Weekend Australian ahead of the Matildas’ clash with Chile in Sydney tonight.

“Not naughty. Just cheeky. I’ve always been like that, especially when I was younger.

“I started playing for Australia when I was 15. I was so naive. I just wanted to have fun. Coaches kept telling me, ‘You’ve got to knuckle down. You’ve got to get serious’. I was like, ‘nah, I just want to do my own thing, leave me alone’.

“If we had a 10pm curfew, I’d be running into my room at 10.15pm, just because it felt like fun. It wasn’t malicious stuff. Just being the class clown, I guess. I never got in trouble. I was just the one they kept their eye on. I couldn’t see myself playing soccer forever, and people may have seen that as just not caring. I was laid-back and I still am, I guess.

“Obviously I’m more professional now. I know my boundaries a bit better. I get the magnitude of it. I know when is the time to have a joke and when it’s not. I was a clown at school. I still am now, I guess. I haven’t changed too much. I don’t want to.”

Kerr leans back on the hotel sofa. Chats away. Her teammates are next to us. There’s no self-consciousness about being overheard. She’s just about the finest female footballer on the planet. Disarmingly free-spirited.

Asked if she has any pre-game superstitions, she laughs: “No, no, no. I’m not superstitious. I just like doing the same things all the time. I say I’m not superstitious and my friends are like, are you joking? Maybe they have a point. If I go for a coffee at 11 o’clock on a Saturday before a game, if I play well, I’ll go for a coffee at 11 o’clock the next game day.

“If I play bad, that’s out the window. No coffee at 11 o’clock. I’ll try 12 o’clock. Sometimes I’ll have a weird lunch. When I play well, I’ve got to have the same lunch the next week.

“This year before the Sky Blue game, when I scored a hat-trick, I went to lunch and bought two things. I hated them both so I chucked a fit and said, ‘I’m just eating chips and guacamole’. That’s not a great meal, right? I pigged out on the chips and guac, scored the hat-trick. The next week, I did have a proper lunch but I had to have chips and guac after it.”

She furrows her brow. “I actually think it helps me believe I’ve ticked all the boxes before a game,” she says. “That I’ve prepared properly in every little way. When I don’t do all these little things, I find myself worrying about not having done it. And if I have a bad game, I’ll blame it on having a coffee at 11. I went at 10 and that stuffed everything up. I’ll start thinking I played badly because I didn’t have chips and guac. I played like shit last week against Canberra, so this Saturday will be a whole new routine.”

Kerr skips through matches like she’s on an unmarked grassy field with the wind in her hair. In her most elevated moments, when she’s scored, she’ll do a somersault, the ultimate expression of glee and a celebration that has come to symbolise the palpable joy in Kerr and the Matildas themselves. They’re a team and a half. They could win next year’s World Cup. Kerr likes that the somersault has become recognisable. And she’s glad there’s no public footage of her first attempt at it.

“I did it in the Asian Cup for the Matildas and stacked it,” she says. “No one sees that video. It was my first ever goal for them, so that’s why I did it. It didn’t go well. So funny. Just got overexcited. Flipped. Landed flat on my ­stomach.

“That was the year we won the Asian Cup. It was such a big game. I was on my stomach, wind knocked out of me. I was like, ‘um, sorry, everyone’.

“I’ll get up now and keep playing. I didn’t do it again for years, not until the Tournament of Nations last year. I landed on my feet. That was my best one. Ever. I don’t do them all the time, but it’s fun.

“It’s cool that people kind of see it as my thing. People see me having a coffee, and they want me to do it. It’s nice. When you’re growing up as a kid, you always want something that separates you from everyone else.”

Kerr plays without repercussions. Win? Terrific. Lose? Whatever. That’s the assumption. Not so. Victories are forgotten about in a heartbeat but defeats can grate for days.

“When we win, I can walk out of a change room and never think of it again,” she says. “But when we lose, I’ll have nights and nights of tossing and turning. I can’t stop thinking about it. I should have done this. I should have done that.”

Her eyes go back to the television screen. Trump. Urgh. “Anyone who knows me, they know I’m the news specialist,” she grins. “Such a news junkie. I’m always reading the news. Watching crime shows, all documentaries. I like to know what’s going on in the real world. American politics is so interesting. Crime shows, war stories, I love that stuff. I always thought I’d be involved in that sort of industry. I mean, I can’t look at blood! But those real-life stories fascinate me. I love a good investigation.”

She says she dreams about soccer. A curious thing: elite athletes always do. They’re normally frustration dreams. Serena Williams dreams about a terrorist attack before the final of a major. She’s forced to leave the country and cannot return in time for her match. Joel Parkinson dreams about a never-ending tube, the most perfect wave in existence. But he can’t quite make the takeoff and it takes off without him. Steve Smith has dreamt of walking out to bat in an SCG Test — but he’s forgotten his bat.

Kerr dreams about the loss of the quality she relies on the most.

“If I dream about football, I dream that I’m really slow,” she says. “I’m a fast striker. Being slow is my worst nightmare. If I didn’t have some speed, I don’t know what I would do. I always have these dreams where I’m trying to run as fast as I can, but I’m just not fast at all. the fast I try to run, the slower I go.

“My legs are really heavy and I’m hardly moving. Lots of people have dreams where they’re running away from people and they can’t get away. Maybe it’s my version of that. I’m really desperate to do things on the field for my team, but I’m just way off the pace. I’m letting everyone down.

“When we lose, it’s going to feel like it’s my fault. Everyone is watching me go slow and they’re thinking that I’m not trying. That I don’t care. What they don’t know is that I’m trying so hard.”