NWSL Week 13 in review: Sam Kerr provides more late-game magic for Sky Blue

Following Sky Blue’s 2-2 draw with Chicago Saturday night, Sam Kerr had a question.

“Does anyone want to ask me about the Chicago video?” Kerr asked the handful of media present at Yurcak Field. “Because I’ve got something to say.”

Kerr had just spent two minutes answering the usual questions, or, more specifically, the questions that have become usual in a world where Sky Blue keeps refusing to die. Then, after eliciting a hearty laugh but no actual takers, Kerr opted to just go ahead and answer anyway, playing both roles in her audition for membership in the NWSL Media Association. “Tell the Chicago media guy, ‘that was for you.’”

The “that was for you” part? Well, the “that” would be the 90th minute goal Kerr scored to cap the latest Sky Blue comeback, this one officially turning a 2-0 Chicago lead into a 2-2 draw.

The truth is, Kerr didn’t really need to answer the question, or at least, she didn’t need to answer it again. The pitch-perfect ball from Sarah Killion, the header, the backflip, kissing the crest on her jersey — Kerr and Sky Blue had, without uttering a word, already said everything that needed to be said.

The video Kerr was referring to was one posted on — and then deleted from — the Red Stars’ Twitter account ahead of Saturday’s meeting between Chicago and Sky Blue. The video itself is the Red Stars, or at least whoever was running their Twitter account, taking a little shot at Kerr.

It starts with the words “the hype seems real with” and then cuts two clips of Kerr, the first showing the diving header that kicked off her hat trick last week against Kansas City, then one of her backflipping after scoring in Portland earlier this season. Then, as the Octave Minds/Chance the Rapper song “Tap Dance” kicks in, the video introduces us to “the best defense in the league,” showing several clips of the Chicago defense being good at defending. And then there’s the actual shot at Kerr, “Kerr vs. Chicago, 2017 0 goals, 1 shot.” And then, presumably because this is where the Chance verse gets kind of cool and it would be something of a disservice to us to cut it off here, the video continues, showing Kerr’s aforementioned shot, and proclaiming it to be “more of a cross,” before ending on the words “see you tomorrow.”

The video itself, for however short a time it existed in an official capacity, was a kind of wonderful piece of banter, and a welcome change from the usual Team Accounts Tweet GIFS at Each Other thing that usually happens in these situations.

Saturday’s game was billed as a battle for second place, and with North Carolina losing earlier in the day, it was also a chance for the winner to further decrease the Courage’s already shrinking lead at the top of the table. That, the inherent hype that comes with the hope of someone making a big move or cementing a place somewhere, was in and of itself a semi-guarantee that the game wouldn’t be particularly good. Add in that the game was at Yurcak Field and you’re pretty much all the way to snooze city.

And for the entire first half, things went pretty much exactly that way. Even with three goals — Sofia Huerta in the fourth minute, Christen Press in the 26th, and then Maya Hayes in the 32nd to cut Chicago’s lead in half — the first 45 minutes felt mostly sleepy and disjointed, like everyone was acting out some poorly written script about how a game is supposed to go.

We’ve seen teams do this before — the disinterested first half, miracle comeback in the dying minutes thing. Seattle won two Shields in some part on that late-game magic. Portland knocked off FCKC in the semis in 2013 the same way. Western NY nailed the back from the dead thing with a 124th minute goal in last year’s championship game. And this year, it’s become Sky Blue — and Kerr’s — signature move

For Kerr, who made her first appearance for Australia as a 15-year-old, this season has been one long in the works. Kerr first started playing professionally in the U.S. in 2013. At 19, Kerr left Australia for Western NY, joining the Flash for NWSL’s inaugural season, going home in the offseason to play, like many NWSL players, in the W-League. In all, Kerr spent two seasons in Western NY, scoring a handful of goals in each while playing for the Flash alongside American stars like Abby Wambach and Carli Lloyd.

In 2014, the Flash, looking to rebuild following a disappointing season, traded Kerr to Sky Blue. New Jersey was a curious, and not particularly desirable, destination for anyone. While other teams were making offseason moves to replace departing players or shore up something that was lacking, in Jersey, everyone was just kind of going through the motions, resigned to whatever it was that was going to happen with whoever they could convince to play there. And maybe bringing in Kerr was supposed to be the start of something different, of the team actively trying to do something that wasn’t make everyone wish they’d brought a blanket and a pillow to the game. But it was also a World Cup year, and thus one that they’d be without Kerr for long stretches of.

Kerr did eventually land in New Jersey and make her debut for Sky Blue, but it wasn’t until after the World Cup, and by then, the season was really already lost. But for Kerr, it was also the start of something. Where she’d had the likes of Wambach and Lloyd to play off of in Western NY, in New Jersey, she immediately found herself at the center of an offense desperate for anything even remotely good.

Sky Blue has never been a strong team offensively. Whoever they’ve brought in over the years to fill the role of goalscorer has quickly flamed out. Nadia Nadim came to the team at the end of the 2014 season, racked up a bunch of goals, and then couldn’t live up to the hype the following year. Now she’s in Portland. Tasha Kai, in both the early WPS days and last season, started out strong before ending up either injured, on the bench or just invisible. And Kerr’s first (half) season in New Jersey went according to whatever that weird plan is — or at least the beginning part of that weird plan — too. Despite playing just nine games, Kerr’s six goals tied her for the team lead.

A year later, Kerr again, and despite making only nine appearances due to the Olympics and injury, led the team in scoring with five goals.

Following the pattern, this year — the one where she was, for the first time, available for a full season — still should’ve been the one where it all went wrong. Except apparently, no one told Kerr. Fifteen games in, Kerr is leading the league in scoring with 10 goals. With last week’s hat trick, she became the NWSL’s all-time leading scorer, and Saturday’s goal against Chicago brought her career total to 36. She’s also now Sky Blue’s all-time leading scorer and the first Sky Blue player to ever reach double digits in a single season, a stat that’s somehow both amazing and unsurprising. And Kerr is still only 23.

There’s a few of these old videos on YouTube of Kerr from her days with Western NY. Two of them are Kerr and Carli Lloyd answering a series of questions about each other. But one is Kerr alone, answering questions about herself. It’s from May 2013. Kerr is just 19 and a month into not just her first NWSL season, but also her first season not playing her club soccer in Australia. For nine minutes, Kerr fields a series of mundane questions, her answers ranging from exactly what you’d expect a 19-year-old kid to say (she misses her dog, she’s confused by the concept of Wal-Mart, the thing she was most scared about when it came to playing in the U.S. was that her teammates would hate her) to delightfully weird (she describes Tim Tams, one of the things she misses most about Australia, as “like the hell of heaven, the darkness, but chocolate).

At one point, Kerr is asked what advice she has for young soccer players. “My best advice I ever got was to just have fun,” she tells whatever offscreen person is asking these questions. “When I am serious and when I think about something too much I don’t play well, so my best advice is to just go out and have fun and be yourself. Because that’s when I play the best.”

Six goals in the last four games. The assist on the fastest goal in league history and another with a pretty no-look pass. A brace against Portland, in Portland. A bicycle kick against Orlando. A hat trick in the span of 12 minutes to turn a 2-0 deficit into a 3-2 win against Kansas City. An 84th minute goal to give Sky Blue a 1-0 win over North Carolina. The 90th minute game-tying goal against Chicago. Two consecutive Player of the Month awards.

Right now, there’s no one that’s having more fun than Sam Kerr.

Portland Thorns 1 - 0 North Carolina Courage

Sky Blue FC 2 - 2 Chicago Red Stars

Orlando Pride 4 - 1 FC Kansas City

Houston Dash 2 - 1 Washington Spirit

Seattle Reign FC 1 - 1 Boston Breakers