'Say it ain't so': Sam Kerr charge comes as a shock

The most famous plea on behalf of the goodness of sport supposedly was uttered just more than a century ago on the steps of a Chicago courthouse as one of the principals of baseball’s Black Sox match-fixing scandal, “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, emerged and a little boy grabbed his coat sleeve and said: “It ain’t true, is it, Joe?”

That’s pretty much all of Australia today, staring dully at the headlines about the Matildas superstar and taliswoman Sam Kerr and feeling the ache in our heart and saying: “It ain’t true, is it, Sam?”

The first thing that needs to be said is that no one should trivialise the charges that have been laid against Kerr. “It’s a very serious allegation – it regards racism, and there’s no place for racism in our sport,” Football Australia CEO James Johnson said. He might have added that there is no place for racism anywhere, and soccer people know that better than most. Kerr has pleaded not guilty to the charge.

The next thing that needs to be said is that the details are sketchy and the timeline puzzling. The alleged offence took place in January 2023, but Kerr was not charged until January this year.

The fact she did not tell FA after being charged probably constitutes a code-of-conduct violation in itself and may be grave enough to jeopardise Kerr’s captaincy of the Matildas regardless of the trial’s outcome. If it was Pat Cummins, say, you’d think he would be out of the job already.

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This is the narrative as we know it, and at one level it’s all too sordidly familiar. But it’s the meta-narrative that is so transfixing.

Between the day of Kerr’s alleged criminal insult and now, the Matildas have grown into arguably Australia’s best-loved national team, filling stadiums wherever they go, inspiring women, converting men and re-defining our national vocation for sport, and Kerr – despite a wretched run with injury – has been the face and figurehead of a phenomenon.

It’s incomprehensible now to realise that as Kerr scored that wonder goal against England in a World Cup semi-final in Sydney last year, this case and all its possible ramifications might have been lurking somewhere in the deepest recesses of her consciousness.

There was – and is – a wholesomeness about the way Kerr and the Matildas went about their business that made Australia universally and unreservedly proud. She was on a pedestal. It was not of her making, and perhaps was impossibly lofty anyway, higher in its saintliness than any men’s plinth. We’re prone to ascribing to our sporting heroes all that we want to be, and we invested a full GDP’s worth in Kerr. It’s our halo she was wearing.

Football Australia CEO James Johnson.Credit: James Brickwood

It means that on Tuesday, people generally were hesitant to pile into Kerr as if she were just another clay-footed, cloth-eared transgressive athlete. There have been plenty enough of those. There’s been a handful in the headlines already this week. We wanted Sam Kerr to be better than them. We still do.

In time, the truth will emerge. The likeliest outcome is that Kerr’s image will lose some of its gloss, regardless of whether the charge is upheld or thrown out (because mud sticks), but she will keep her country’s grace and favour. History will see to that.

In the meantime, it’s worth remembering Jackson’s supposed reply to that little boy in Chicago in 1921 – “yes, kid, I’m afraid it is true” - and that Jackson later confirmed that the exchange was all a reporter’s fiction and never happened.

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