Teen star Kennedy turned into durable pro

[caption id="attachment_67778" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Mark Kennedy playing for Liverpool in 1997."]

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A quiz question to start. Name a current Irish footballer who has been managed by Glenn Hoddle, Mick McCarthy (for club and country), Jack Charlton, Kevin Keegan, Gerard Houllier, Joe Kinnear and Roy Keane. Here's a clue. He's played for, amongst others, Liverpool, Wimbledon, QPR, and Crystal Palace, and may be the longest-serving Irish pro in England just now, with a CV stretching back to 1993. For those of you who still haven't figured it out, the answer to the question was playing left-back for Ipswich Town at the New Den last weekend. His name is Mark Kennedy

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By our estimates and those of soccer base, the world's finest statistics website, Kennedy made his 538th appearance as a professional against Millwall. A few months past his 35th birthday, he returned to one of his old haunts in South London. Although, eyewitness reports suggest he had a rough afternoon at the feet of Liam Feeney, the fact Kennedy was there at all is kind of remarkable. He made his professional debut for Millwall at the age of just 16 in a side managed by McCarthy. That was so long ago the club still played at The Den, rather than The New Den.

The fact Kennedy looks like he may yet reach the 600 appearance milestone is significant too because here's a guy who spent three years of his career shuttling between the bench and the stands at Anfield. A lifetime ago, or the spring of 1995 to be exact, Liverpool had briefly made him the most expensive teenager in the world when they bought him from Millwall for £1.5 million. Coming on as a sub against Leeds United in his first outing, he smacked the crossbar with a superb shot. The ball didn't go in though and that was the beginning, the middle and the end of his greatness in red. Not for the first time, a player found out the hard way that moving to a big club too early can be disastrous.

When we looked up at that game recently, we found Kennedy came on for Mark Walters that day. Walters is a name from the footballing past, a name that shows how the Dubliner has aged remarkably. We came across another game against Manchester United later in 1995 and of the players who figured in that clash, just three are still active in serious football. The other two are Phil Neville and Ryan Giggs. Whisper it now but the thing is Kennedy was supposed to be Ireland's Giggs. No, seriously, that's the way it was.

Word had been filtering out of Millwall for a while in the early 1990s that the Dubliner was a special talent, a pacy, powerful left winger. Then he popped up on television in an FA Cup game against Arsenal. Collecting the ball just inside his own half, he set off down the left, cut inside and let fly. A goal so memorable that one English journalist compared the execution of it to Geoff Hurst's famous strike in the World Cup. The type of goal that promised greatness. The type of goal that parted Liverpool from their money.

Against that background, there are many who would consider Kennedy a failure. An Irish international as a teenager, he never fulfilled his potential at that level either, besmirching his reputation with the car-stamping escapade involving Phil Babb. Those type of antics, feverishly covered in the tabloids back when his star still possessed some celebrity wattage, contributed to the impression Kennedy was a waster, a man not wringing as much as he might from the gifts he was given. He seemed the poster boy for young players earning too much money too quickly and not being able to handle the lifestyle.

For a while, we bought into this view of him. Yet here he is. Still going strong. Still earning a crust just one level below the top flight. Where are all his peers? Gary Kelly was a couple of years older than Kennedy but he retired back in 2007. Kennedy's continued presence in the game should force us to examine what we expect of young footballers. He never became out Giggs but was it even fair of us to think he might? And what should we think of him now that he's closing in on two decades as a professional, two decades in which he morphed from the role of troubled teen starlet to elder statesman, from mercurial leftwing menace to doughty and mature left back?

"We all need to have a long hard look at ourselves and start taking responsibility for it," said Kennedy, sounding very much the elder statesman after Ipswich were trounced by Peterborough earlier this season. "It wasn't good enough and I think I speak on behalf of the rest of the lads in the dressing room by apologizing to the fans and saying that we are determined to get things right. Here the fans have been right behind us in every match and we need to remember just how lucky we are to have fans like that supporting us, and the sooner we realize that, the better."

We sometimes forget how difficult it is to make it in a professional sport. Any professional sport. Kennedy went to England, lit the place up and then was forced at the tender age of 22 to try to rebuild his reputation after his nightmare at Anfield, a place where he made a whopping five starts in three years! Not only that, his subsequent transfer to Wimbledon didn't work out well either. He left there in the summer of 1999, moving to Manchester City when nobody was sure he'd ever make anything of the rest of his career.

City were playing in what is now the Championship back then, Kennedy scored four times in his first six games and was voted the club's player of the year when they won promotion the following May. That was 11 years ago. And they say a week is a long time in football.

 

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