For four weeks during the World Cup, just about everyone in Australia knew everything there was to know about Sam Kerr’s left calf. But for the nine weeks since, almost nobody cared about the right one. Not even really Kerr, for a while, after she went down following a challenge during the second half of Australia’s third-place play-off against Sweden.
We all saw her on the ground at Suncorp Stadium, holding the opposite leg to the injury that kept her out of the tournament’s early stages and will forever go down as one of the most speculated-upon muscles in Australian sporting history. But she continued playing until the end and was unfazed about it after the game.
“I just kept playing, I didn’t care at that point,” Kerr said on Saturday. “I just kept running until the last minute. I didn’t even really know. I didn’t know until I got back to Chelsea two weeks later. I went on a holiday, just chilled. I knew it was sore, but didn’t think it was that sore.”
Back at Chelsea, Kerr slowly but surely did the rehab, and started the past couple of English Women’s Super League games. Most of the outside world assumed she was rehabbing the left calf. It wasn’t Saturday, in front of Australian media for the first time since the Sweden match, that a simple enquiry about recent life at Chelsea revealed the full extent of her struggles.
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“It’s been difficult to be honest,” was the first thing she said. “I re-did my calf in the Sweden game. Well, not re-did it, did the other one. So I was rehabbing that and then came back.
“I’ve just had a bit of an icky run the last two months, but now I’m back to getting back to full fitness, enjoying being back on the park, sick of being with the physios. I am back to being on the park every day, training, playing. And it was great [coach] Emma [Hayes] let me have the time, but then I had to come back and start getting fit again, that’s for sure.”
