Chelsea's Sam Kerr opens up on her time away from the sport | "All I want to do is play football"

Do I have to clap? Waiting for my moment. Sam, thanks for joining us. So good to see you back. It's been quite a while. When you look back at last season and what you went through, how much of a barrier was that for you? Of course, being out for the whole season was really tough. All I want to do is play football, find so much joy in playing football. So it was just really tough being away from, you know, doing what I love. This is my passion. This is, you know, everything I've worked for. So, of course, it was difficult to miss the whole season. But honestly, it was a good learning experience. In what way? I mean, there was many learning experiences. I think I found that, you know, there's so much more to life than just football. I realised that sometimes I need to put myself first. And last year, maybe in times I didn't. And I think it was just a good learning curve for myself. Your life has changed so much in that time that you've been sidelined, but in a really good way. Yeah, I mean, yeah. I mean, we've obviously got Jags, and it's been the most amazing experience of my life. And learning curve again. Nothing now I do in football or nothing I do in life will be as important as being, you know, a parent. And it's so much fun. Like, I hear so many negative things about it. But, you know, I've had the most fun I've ever had in the last four months trying to be a parent and co-parent with Christy. We know absolutely nothing. But it's so fun to learn and just see this other side of life that my parents had told me about for so long that now I'm getting to experience. I love football. It's given me so much. But now it's like I have this other thing in life that has the same feeling as football. And we get it every morning, like every morning at six o'clock when I wake up and see him and he's just smiling. It's just the best. You've spoken in the past about how it's easy to get to the top, but it's staying at the top and maintaining that level and taking it to another level to keep being successful. And that's what you're going to have to do again this season. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the hardest part. Like you said, I've said that before, but I think staying at the top is the hardest, whether it's individually, as a team. But yeah, I think that's the challenge. That's the good part. Everyone would rather be at the top than the bottom, right? We don't get a lot of sympathy from people with the squad depth we have, all of those things. The success that you've had. But it's not an easy place to be when you're at the top and everyone's trying to, you know, catch you, break you down. It's a stressful, it's a stressful environment to continuously try and compete for trophies. How do you manage that stress then? Well, I haven't dealt with that for a year, so I don't know. Welcome back. Coming back, because you've been out for that for the last season, how would you assess Chelsea going into the new season? Because everybody is going to be hunting you down and you know that. Yeah, I mean, I don't think, even though I've missed a year, I don't think that's any different from the year before. So I think we're used to it. I think we kind of thrive off that a little bit. And I guess last year, the girls had it kind of from the start, they were leading. But in previous years, it hadn't been that. So I think last year was a little bit different for the girls. But I mean, this league's so tough. You know, there's so many great teams. You saw Arsenal jump with the Champions League. It's a tough league. Of course, yeah, treble winners, whatever. But I think we all just want to start fresh. We all want to go for it and be like, we're going for everything this year. And of course, we're really proud of the past. But this is a new season. This is a new us. This is new players, new teams. So we have to act on that.