Stupid and White

When details emerged of the night when Sam Kerr was said to have racially harassed a police officer, it seemed as though women’s football might finally have birthed some tabloid-worthy gossip. 

A night on the tiles with the missus? Nausea in the taxi home? Flat refusal to spare a cent of her six-figure footballer’s salary on a clean-up charge, and smashed-up property to boot? 

We’ve heard this story before. It harks back to the early days of the Premiership, when footballers were all over magazines and newspapers, papped on outrageous nights out, drunk on the newfound riches and status that the birth of this new league had bestowed upon them. This quote, taken from Old Too Soon, Smart Too Late, the autobiography of former Newcastle midfielder Kieron Dyer, sums up life for footballers in the late 90s / early 00s.

It was a dangerous feeling. You behaved badly and nobody told you not to… When you’re a young footballer no one ever seems to say ‘no’.

Today’s Premier League poster boys are far more polite — almost painfully focussed. It’s hard to imagine Bukayo Saka getting out of a taxi without tipping generously and double-checking that he’d shut the door properly on his way out. These days, blokes are used to getting minted off their first touch, and academies are wise to the need to keep young lads’ heads level. 

The astronomical rise of the women’s game has rapidly made Sam Kerr a globally renowned sport star. So it’s no surprise that “power and privilege” turned out to be the central theme of her trial for racially aggravated harassment, the questions of who shows respect to whom, who should be believed, who gets to act as they please with no regard for the consequence. 

The trial did not decide whether or not PC Stephen Lovell, on duty the night when Kerr and partner Kristie Mewis were dropped onto the doorstep of Twickenham Police Station by a disgruntled taxi driver, was called “stupid and white”. A recording by the officer’s bodycam shows that this happened and it was Sam Kerr who said it.

What the bodycam didn’t show, though, was what happened in the black cab. 

As I said — we’ve heard this story before. Given Dyer’s comment and the rich history of footballers behaving badly, the situation is easy to read — a world-famous striker got a bit too mashed and felt confident she could talk her way out of trouble. This was a line of questioning pursued by Kerr’s lawyer, Grace Forbes, when cross-examining Lovell:

You made an assumption about her that she was a troublemaker, that she was difficult and, because of what she does for a living, she was an arrogant person?

In court, Lovell denied that this was a factor, claiming that he did not know that the woman before him was Sam Kerr, striker for Chelsea and the Australian national team. 

Either way, the story told to Lovell by the taxi man — women go out on piss, throw up in the taxi, refuse to pay, intentionally damage the driver’s means of work, thereby also ending his night shift — was just the latest of so many drunken disputes Lovell has had to deal with. Not the sort of thing, presumably, for which Lovel dreamt of joining the force.

This is only a very familiar matter of procedure, then. 

Next, Kerr is giving her side of things, claiming that the taxi driver flew off the handle after he found her spit-spewing vomit out into the night air, her head resting on the wound-down back-seat window. As he began speeding and driving in an unsafe manner, Kerr and Mewis thought of Sarah Everard, who was kidnapped by an off-duty police officer from the streets of Clapham, driven to Kent, assaulted and murdered. With the doors of the taxi locked, and the couple’s requests to be let out of the vehicle allegedly ignored, Mewis kicked the glass out of the rear window, fashioning a means of escape. 

Now, PC Lovell has to decide who he believes and without evidence, he can only rely on his imagination. In his imagination, there’s no scenario where kicking out the back window of a cab makes sense. It just doesn’t stack up. What’s more, he’s met the taxi driver himself — he dropped the women off, complaining — and he can’t see how he can have seriously been considered a threat. 

Lately, queer TikTok creator Alaire Thomas has made a series of comic POV videos entitled “You look masculine but want the girls to feel safe at night”. These riff off the idea that solo females in the dark might feel threatened by her butch appearance, mistaking her for a sexual predator. In one clip, Thomas immediately sprints across the road when she sees a girl in a mock effort to show she has no interest in harassing or assaulting her. This is a parody, but it is also a fantasy — vulnerable people crave that those who could be perceived as a threat would make themselves ridiculous in order to make them feel safe. It is made absurd by the truth that, on another night, it would be Thomas herself feeling threatened.

Kerr experiences the same contradiction. Last week, she told courts that she is careful what she wears around shopping centres, since her Indian heritage often attracts the attention of security guards who follow her around suspiciously. On other days, she is calling 999 after being locked into a stranger’s car. 

If Kerr’s intersecting identities were too much of a headfuck for PC Lovell, I'd love to know what Kieron Dyer makes of it.

“ANIMALS” was the headline that ran alongside papped snaps of Dyer’s boozy Ayia Napa blow-out in the summer of 2000 when, along with the likes of Rio and Lamps, Dyer was involved in an incident in which a woman was filmed having sex without her consent.

In his memoir, Dyer describes how he and Leeds United defender Jonathan Woodgate threw pints of beer at each other on that holiday, pissing off other punters who weren’t dressed, as they were, as beach bums, but had come to the bar to have a nice time in all their now alcohol-drenched finery.

It was the end of the season and we thought we were invincible.

I think there was a general feeling that we could do anything we wanted. We didn’t have to play by the rules that society abided by and so we cut loose.

The following year, Woodgate was charged with affray after beating an Asian student, Sarfraz Najeib, unconscious outside Majestyk nightclub in Leeds city centre. Najeib’s night out ended with a broken leg, nose and cheekbone, and bite marks on his face. 

But for Woodgate, this was the Prem’s golden age, just another one of those wild nights on which the feeling of invincibility got the better of him. It was soon forgotten with 100 hours community service — no jail — and the £7,000-a-week pay rise handed him by Leeds United later that month certainly helped with the court expenses incurred.

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