Matildas’ silver lining in Kerr heartbreak as injury curse strikes again

Chelsea say ‘no time frame’ has been placed on her return as yet, but have ruled her out of the remainder of the Women’s Super League season which ends in May. She will undergo further testing upon her return to London.

It’s the latest in a sad recent run of injuries suffered by the Matildas captain and Australian all-time record scorer. She suffered a calf injury the day before Australia’s opening game of the 2023 Women’s World Cup, which kept her out of the group stage.

She returned for the knockouts, initially off the bench, and scored one of the most memorable goals in Australian football history in the semi-final with a long-range screamer against England.

But in the heartbreaking third-place playoff defeat to Sweden, she suffered a calf injury to her other leg, and has since battled a series of minor niggles at Chelsea, including a foot injury that ruled her out of December’s Matildas friendlies against Canada.

Matildas’ Olympics hopes take major hit as Kerr suffers ‘devastating’ injury blow

“Considering how hard Sam has worked over the past six months to return to play, this news is a devastating blow for everyone,” Matildas coach Tony Gustavsson said.

“With her ability to lead by example, Sam’s guidance and influence on the team is significant and, as a result, this will be an incredible loss for the national team.

“Our focus now is on ensuring she has all the support she wants and needs to navigate recovery and rehab.”

What is somewhat remarkable is that Kerr has escaped serious injury for so long – especially after it marred the start of her career. The first ACL injury, in 2011, required a knee reconstruction and cost her a place at the 2012 London Olympics. She suffered another knee injury in 2014 at Perth Glory, and watched on in crutches as her teammates lost the W-League grand final (now the A-League Women’s).

At the time, the 21-year-old believed her football career could have been over.

AIS strength and conditioning coach Aaron Holt spent six weeks working with her on a high-intensity rehabilitation program.

He told KeepUp last year: “She came in, and she was probably at rock bottom. Genuinely going: ‘Am I ever going to play football again?’”

That six-week period managed to get her fit for the 2015 World Cup. Four years later, ahead of the 2019 World Cup, she wrote a letter to Holt thanking him.

“I never got the chance to tell you how grateful I am for the time you spent with me.

“When I injured my knee in 2014 my life came crashing down, and I thought I would never make the 2015 World Cup.

“The most important part about the time I spent with you is that you cared more about the person than the player.”

In 2015, she ruptured her Lisfranc joint and required surgery and a plate to be inserted in her foot.

Again, her career seemed on the ropes.

“I knew straight away that it was a serious, serious injury. The hardest part about being injured is the mental side of things,” the Matildas skipper said in a Nike documentary, ‘Sam Kerr: Birthplace of Dreams’.

“It’s probably the lowest point I’ve ever been in my life and career.”

Again, she worked tirelessly to return, this time making it back in time for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.

But after that trio of devastating injuries early in her 20s, Kerr enjoyed a clean run of years without major injury – and shot to superstardom as one of the world’s finest players.

She has broken scoring records across multiple different leagues, including at Chelsea where she has won two golden boots in the WSL and has scored 99 goals in 128 games, winning four-straight WSL titles and three-straight FA Cups.

But after four goals in eight league games this season, she has now played her last game for Chelsea this year – and her last under legendary coach Emma Hayes, who is leaving at season’s end to take over the US Women’s national team.

Kerr is off-contract at the end of the season, and had been set to spark a bidding war that could see her become the first WSL player to earn more than $1m AUD in club wages per year (currently she reportedly earns just under $800,000 per year, the highest salary in women’s football).

Now, clubs could think twice about spending so much on a 30-year-old, given the significant rehabilitation time and threat of reinjury.

And should she leave Chelsea, she will do so stranded just one goal short of a century of strikes for the club.

While her club future remains up in the air, there’s no doubt it is also a massive blow to the Matildas, who appeared primed to again compete for a first-ever Olympic medal.

The Matildas finished a best-ever fourth at the Tokyo Olympics, and matched that feat at last year’s Women’s World Cup.

Finishing just short of the medals two major tournaments in a row left the Matildas feeling gutted.

“We’re really disappointed – to come fourth again kind of feels like the worst position to come,” said Kerr at the time.

Caitlin Foord said: “We did the exact same thing that happened at the Olympics. That was my worst nightmare for that to happen again, and it has happened again. So we just need to grow and learn from it and never let this happen again.”

She added that she believes the Matildas squad has the quality to win a World Cup.

“We have the team to do it, and I guess we just need to be at our best every single game and every moment,” she said.

But without Kerr, that proposition becomes markedly more difficult.

THE SILVER LINING FROM WORLD CUP PAIN

However, the silver lining to Kerr’s painful last eight months has been that the Matildas now have experience playing in major tournaments without her.

Caitlin Foord and Mary Fowler played exceptionally as a strike partnership throughout the group games, and at times the Matildas attack appeared to flow better than with Kerr leading the line. Indeed, one of the Matildas’ long-running issues has been an over-reliance on Kerr in attack, which is understandable given her propensity to score bags of goals.

Veteran Emily van Egmond impressed as a hold-up forward at times in the World Cup, while a host of young talents are pushing the established core in the selection race.

Foord and Hayley Raso led the goalscoring for Australia at the World Cup, while Fowler improved in leaps and bounds and looms as the new focal point for the Matildas at the 2024 Olympics – should Australia qualify.

First, they need to beat world number 47 Uzbekistan in a two-leg playoff next month, the second leg taking place at Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium on February 28.

Coach Tony Gustavsson has been trying to re-engineer the team in the wake of the World Cup, adopting a more possession-based style of play rather than the typical Matildas’ counterattacking transitional approach.

Part of that tactical development was surely intended to provide a tactical alternative if the team is without Kerr.

After the two defeats to Canada in December, he said: “What concerns me a little bit now is the lack of pacy options up front in the four front positions.

“With [Holly] McNamara getting injured again and then [Cortnee] Vine being out and Sam [Kerr] out, that’s something we need to look into how to handle that going forward.

“Because we had a very clear idea of how to do that in the World Cup … we managed to play without Sam and I thought the team handled that [challenge] well.”

McNamara, a 20-year-old striker, would have been among the candidates to replace Kerr in the Olympics squad. But the Melbourne City starlet suffered a third ACL tear of her career last November, just after being recalled to the Matildas squad.

McNamara is one of six A-League Women’s players to suffer the injury in the first half of this season, ten NRLW players and nine AFLW players suffered an ACL injury last season.

Fellow Matildas Ellie Carpenter, Kyah Simon, Chloe Logarzo and Elise Kellond-Knight have all done the same injury in the last two years.

According to some studies, elite women’s athletes are up to six or seven times more likely to damage their ACL than men, with a host of superstars forced to miss the 2023 Women’s World Cup through the injury.

That list included Vivianne Miedema (Netherlands), Beth Mead and Leah Williamson (England), Catarina Macario and Christen Press (USA), and Janine Beckie (Canada) among plenty of others.

FIFA last year dedicated a taskforce to the growing epidemic of ACL injuries among women’s footballers, and the causes of the high rates of the prevalence of the injury are not yet well known.

Among the contributing factors is the overloading of players in an increasingly condensed fixture calendar – something which has seen Sam Kerr and other veterans have their Matildas playing minutes restricted in recent years to allow them to rest. Other factors researchers are investigating include the quality of fields, their boots (often designed to accommodate male feet), and strength and conditioning programs.

If there’s a second positive that may come out of Kerr’s injury, it is that her high profile may help to reinforce the need for ACL injuries to be better researched and understood.

In isolation, Kerr’s injury is a devastating setback to the Matildas’ hopes of ending their run of tournament near-misses.

But, like Tony Gustavsson said after Kerr injured her calf on the eve of the World Cup, injuries are a part of football. That’s especially – and sadly – the case with women’s players and ACLs.

The silver lining in last year’s heartbreak was that the Matildas squad proved they could step up without their talismanic striker.

Now they’ll have to do it again.