OLDEST IRISH AMERICAN NEWSPAPER IN USA, ESTABLISHED IN 1928
Category: Archive

Broken promise

February 16, 2011

By Staff Reporter

At times an appropriate gesture, it appeared a little bit pathetic coming from him. Great players inspire the crowd with crunching tackles, breathtaking passes, and vital goals. Good players and people like thankfully-retired Irish phsio Mick Byrne resort to direct cheerleading. Kelly was so good once that many observers that that he might become great. He never did reach those heights, though, and that’s what makes his premature retirement from international football last week especially poignant.
It may sound like a terribly churlish thing to say about somebody boasting 52 caps for his country, two trips to the World Cup finals, and more than 300 Premiership appearances by the age of 29, but it’s true. The fact he needed the extended build-up before the first game against Cameroon to finagle his way into the starting lineup in the summer of 2002 speaks volumes for how his career panned out. He should have been going to Japan as one of the mainstays of the Irish side, not an 11th-hour addition. That he was still able to break into the team at that juncture offers another clue to the level of ability he had and never properly used.
That much was obvious to anybody who remembered his jousts with Ryan Giggs (when Giggs was in his prime) during the 1993-94 season. It was two aggressive young bucks locking antlers so tenaciously that the United winger would describe Kelly more than once as his toughest opponent. That first campaign as a Leeds United regular under Howard Wilkinson, the manager having converted him from flighty winger to full-back on a hunch that had previously worked on Chris Morris at Sheffield Wednesday, engendered so much promise we were entitled to dream big for Kelly.
So what happened? Giggs remained Giggs for much of the 1990s, but Kelly drifted from the man voted right back on the PFA Team of the Season at 19 years of age to just another average Premiership full-back. A rivalry that once looked like enthralling us for years to come faded quickly because, though Kelly was still capable of being brilliant on his day, he was ordinary far too often.
He had several spells out of the Leeds team, missed most of a season with shin splints, fell in and out of favor with Mick McCarthy at the international level, and at some point it became obvious he was never quite going to become an elite footballer.
Some will trace his decline to the time he became part of the irritating beyond belief “Three Amigos” cabal with Jason McAteer and Phil Babb at the 1994 World Cup. For a country in the first flush of tabloidization, they were heaven-sent characters: young, attractive, funny, and, when it mattered, for a brief spell, actually good on the field. It’s probably not a coincidence though that nearly 10 years down the line, not one of their careers blossomed like it should have. Too much too young? Possibly. In hindsight, the sight of Kelly, Babb and McAteer being interviewed over several pages of the lads’ magazine Loaded in the mid-’90s should have set off alarm bells.
“You go into a shop and it’s just Armani this and Armani that, and you buy it,” Kelly once said. “Clothes that you don’t even need. I spent a grand once. Bit of a waste of money, really.”
Arguably the worst indictment of Kelly is that after breaking into McCarthy’s plans in Japan, he faded so badly in the second half of games (apart from against Cameroon) that his conditioning as a 27-year-old professional footballer was open to question. Much was made of how hard he sweated to win his place, yet on the field he looked like the classic case of the prizefighter who worked so hard to make the weight he had nothing left after the first few rounds. So versatile he did time in three different positions in the World Cup — left-back, right-back and right side of midfield — he flattered to deceive at every station.
He always looked like he might be capable of doing something, but he was never quite able to deliver. The best that could be said of him is that even when things were going wrong for him, he still looked for the ball and never hid. That is hardly what we would have expected to be saying about him after watching him storm onto the scene eight years earlier.
Unlike so many of his comrades, Kelly did always appear like a decent sort who understood how lucky he’d been to make it. With a lot less fanfare and publicity than Niall Quinn, he gave over

Other Articles You Might Like

Sign up to our Daily Newsletter

Click to access the login or register cheese