Sam Kerr: 'When the goals come you have more fun – it’s a ripple effect' | Matthew Hall

Three days after Samantha Kerr made football history by scoring four times in an incredible 5-4 Sky Blue FC comeback in the NWSL last weekend, a team-mate declares it is “hotter than Satan’s ball sack”. The player is filing an improvised weather report during a morning training session in the humid New Jersey summer sun but it’s fair to say everything around Sam Kerr right now is hot. Very hot.

The Perth-born striker tops the NWSL goalscoring charts this season as well as being the league’s all-time leading goalscorer. For added drama, last weekend’s feat included a missed penalty – in the 94th minute with the game tied at 4-4 – before Kerr eventually found a winning goal seconds later.

“I should have had five,” Kerr says, of her feat the previous weekend. “It might be a better story to miss the penalty but I was pretty disappointed when I missed it.”

Off the training field, Kerr is sitting in air-conditioning with an ice pack strapped to her knee. She explains how she rediscovered her love for the sport after long-term injuries almost made her quit the game last year. For Kerr, fun equals form.

“Now it is all about doing what I love,” she says. “I’m relaxed and enjoying what I’m doing and when the goals come you have more fun. It’s a ripple effect.”

Kerr’s recent NWSL form followed her key role in Australia’s stand-out performance at the recent Tournament of Nations in the United States. The Matildas woke up the world of women’s football by beating the hosts 1-0, Japan 4-2 and Brazil 6-1. The results catapulted Kerr and her team-mates from being a team of wannabes to serious contenders for next year’s Asian Women’s Cup and the 2019 Women’s World Cup.

“We were pretty pumped after the win against the US but [coach Alen Stajcic] is good at pulling us into line and putting things into perspective,” she says. “It really was one game at a time but we enjoyed beating the USA the most.”

Kerr says the Australian team has been spoken of as having potential to join the world’s elite for many years but the time has come to deliver on promise. Remarkably, at 23-years old, Kerr is an eight-year veteran of the team. She says the current generation is as close to a real team as she has ever experienced – a fact reflected on the pitch.

“The last few years we’ve talked about it but now we are really walking the walk,” she says. “Everyone on the team is on a level playing field now. There are no hierarchies, there are no cliques, it is everyone together. We are fit and we are fast. That’s where women’s football is going at the moment. It is fast and aggressive.”

Kerr says how the team is treated off the field is improving in line with onfield results. She laughs when reminded how, in 1999, some team members posed nude for a calendar before the 2000 Sydney Olympics in an attempt to raise the team’s profile and boost their incomes.

“Things that are just crazy,” she says of what the team experienced in past generations. “The team has grown so much even since I have been involved. I remember my first game: the facilities, the amount of money, the travel…” She pulls a face. “They are little things, maybe they don’t sound like big issues to some people, but they make a huge difference and allow us to feel like a professional team.”

Almost as incredible as her recent four-goal salvo, Kerr only took up football at the age of 12. Her father played and coached Australian rules football and her older brother Daniel was a star for the glitzy West Coast Eagles AFL team during the 2000s. Her brother made headlines off the field, too: brawling in a nightclub with a team-mate, forging drug prescriptions, being implicated in a drug dealing ring, and a string of assault charges that culminated in a brief spell in prison.

“If you are smart about it, it’s fine being in the spotlight but obviously my brother wasn’t smart about it and it became a problem,” Kerr says. “Luckily, he has come really good now and has got a great job, a great house, has three kids, and is in a really good place.

“My brother got drafted [to the AFL] when I was seven,” she explains. “When I was 16 I thought it was cool that he was famous and then when I was 18 I thought it was annoying but I was definitely aware of [the attention]. There are a few times when you forget that things you can write on Twitter or Instagram can be picked up by the media so you just have to be careful.”

With the spotlight now on the youngest Kerr, the season has been capped by being shortlisted for Fifa’s prestigious player of the year award. She describes the nomination as “weird but awesome” and “surreal” to be considered for an honour previously won by Abby Wambach and Carli Lloyd – former team-mates and role models she now calls friends.

First though, there’s time with the dog she is fostering during the NWSL season and afternoons on the beach near the Jersey Shore apartment she shares with some team-mates. She’s also spent $105 on a beach season pass (an alien concept for someone from Perth) which suggests the hot weather will continue – as well as Kerr’s hot form.

“Some people can just do football, football, football but I need an escape,” she says. “New Jersey is a beautiful place. There are beaches and there is New York City an hour away. My off-field lifestyle is really important. If I am unhappy off the field, I don’t play well. Here, I can just come to training, have fun, be who I am, and play like I play.”