February 16, 2011
By Staff Reporter
The answer, as any trainspotting soccer fan should know, is Alan Kelly Jr. His namesake and father managed the side for one victory over Switzerland in 1980, he himself worked as a spark before signing for Preston North End, and he breeds champion dogs in his spare time.
Kelly exited the stage at Blackburn Rovers a few days ago. His retirement, due to a severe finger injury, was accompanied by the lack of fanfare that is the lot of somebody who never quite got the breaks he deserved. His great misfortune was to be Ireland’s best player during the last 18 months of the Jack Charlton era. For the last few games of that faltering Euro 96 qualifying campaign, he was absolutely brilliant.
The pity was that the team around him was on the serious wane, a decline somewhat accelerated by Charlton’s increasingly laissez-faire approach to off-the-field discipline in those days. As a result, nobody remembers Kelly magnificently keeping the score down during the embarrassing 3-0 rout by Portugal at the Stadium of Light.
Every time he performed heroics — and that we lost only 2-0 to Holland at Anfield was also down to him — it became apparent Charlton should have bit the bullet and played him ahead of a faltering Packie Bonner at the 1994 World Cup. Of course, whether he would have kept us in that tournament any longer than Bonner did is a moot point.
What isn’t at issue is that Kelly’s terrible luck was to have another brilliant Donegal goalkeeper, Shay Given, suddenly burst through in early 1996. Given was younger and better, and although he started a few more competitive games, Kelly was more or less second choice from then on. That his annexing of the No. 1 jersey should coincide with the emergence of a player who will eventually go down as Ireland’s finest-ever custodian was typical of his whole career.
Just when he seemed destined for greater things, a spanner would be thrown in the works. As a youngster at Preston, he was in a serious car crash that put him out of the game for a year. In his prime in the mid-’90s, he stayed at Sheffield United far too long after they had drifted out of the Premiership. The only upside was the fans at Bramall Lane so worshipped him legions of them used to travel to Ireland games in Dublin wearing T-shirts in his honor.
Despite constant speculation about a move to a bigger club, though, the tabloid tittle-tattle came to naught. On one occasion, an upwardly mobile Premiership outfit were set to sign him but a former Sheffield manager, bearing a personal grudge, maliciously put the word out he had a dodgy back. The move died. That’s the way of it with the professional game.
We have a certain romantic image of it as a meritocracy where good play is ultimately rewarded by higher wages or a move to a bigger club. Really it’s no less petty or provincial than junior or schoolboy soccer. Probably even more so because a bad word in the right ear about an individual can end up costing him serious money.
Had Kelly moved then, who knows how the later years of his career might have turned out? Certainly, eking out a living as a reserve keeper at Blackburn seemed a fairly ignominious end. Not to mention that his role as third lieutenant alongside Niall Quinn and Steve Staunton in Saipan earned him the lasting enmity of Roy Keane.
Duff distressed
The denouement of Kelly’s career is important this week because the way he was kept too long at the wrong club offers an insight into the murkier side of the sport. A side that became all too apparent to Damien Duff when news broke about Chelsea signing Arjen Robben from PSV Eindhoven the other day.
“I must admit it was a bit of a kick in the teeth after two months out to hear about it,” said Duff, with unusual candor. “But I’ll just have to carry on doing what I always do and work hard. I hear Robben is a left winger, but I don’t play there very often, so maybe I’ll get a game somewhere else in the team.”
Notwithstanding that Duff is, at this point, a better player than Robben, or that Chelsea’s policy of building a squad rather than a balanced team looks like it may well backfire, there was a valuable lesson taught here. This is a game about what you have done for somebody lately. It scarcely matters that Duff was brilliant earlier in the season or that he’s Claudio Ranieri’s mother’s favorite footballer. The longer he was in the treatment room — and he is starting to look prone to injury — the more he faded from the owner’s memory.
Ridiculous as that may sound, it’s as good a way as any other of explaining the club spending so big on another left winger. It shouldn’t surprise us either. Professional soccer is a game where logic doesn’t always underpin decisions. By almost every account except the official United version, Alex Ferguson dropped Ruud Van Nistelrooy last week because the Dutchman said in an interview that the team was missing David Beckham.
What’s most worrying here though is that anything which affects Duff these days affects Ireland too. With the latest Keane international comeback looking dead in the water, the chances of getting to the next World Cup are more and more wrapped up in the mercurial Dubliner. He’s a player whose best form has always coincided with his spells as a first-team regular. The prospect of him catching splinters on the Stamford Bridge bench next season is not something we want to consider.