Now just off his century of caps, Kevin Kilbane bucks the trend of the modern professional in his enduring devotion to playing for his country, writes Tom Humphries
“Players these days don’t see it as pride in their country, they see it more as a chore, you know ‘God, I have to go again’. That was the way it always was for me.”
– Stephen Ireland
October, 2009
WE NEED to talk about Kevin. There is something seriously wrong with Kevin Kilbane. In a world of gloriously narcissistic, whinge-bag millionaires he stands out like a mop-haired sore thumb. With all his pleases and his thank yous and his humility and his ready smiles. He’s too bloody happy. And polite. And willing. And patient.
He suffers the slings and arrows which paying customers throw at him and gets on with his job. He is so deeply eccentric that he has forgotten to “retire” from international football to concentrate on his club career. He’d walk over hot coals to get to a kick around. He even treats journalists well.
What’s his game? What sort of example is he setting? Do we want our kids to be like this? All open faced and enthusiastic and grateful. Niall Quinn once said that Kevin Kilbane is the sort of guy of you’d want your daughter to marry. Quinn stuck out like a big lanky sore thumb of course.
Tonight Kilbane will be in Croke Park. He’ll sing the anthem and he’ll glue the huddle together and he’ll give it his all till he is called ashore or the referee blows the final whistle. And so with a huge game against Italy he will arrive on the cusp of a landmark none of us thought possible when we saw him make his debut in Iceland 12 years ago. Ninety-nine caps and his century looming next Wednesday. An incredible run of being selected for almost 60 competitive games in a row.
Does he not realise how deeply unfashionable he is? No Bentleys pimped in pink. No superman jocks. No strops. No sulks. No tantrums. Ah, God love him.
That day in Reykjavik, the day they were burying the Princess of Wales and the Irish team baffled the locals by wearing back armbands, you’d have got long odds on Kilbane’s career reaching double figures in terms of caps. Every coltish adventure down the left wing ended with him being flattened or the ball running harmlessly out of play. Or both. He was awful. and he lasted till half-time. He didn’t reappear in an Irish jersey for six months but he kept on keeping on. He didn’t start another Irish game for two years. By the time Ireland came home from the 2002 World Cup he had became indispensable.
“Genuinely,” he says with a grin, “I can’t remember too much about that day in Iceland. I look back and I remember that, yeah, I didn’t play well. I can’t remember why I didn’t play well (actually the reason why was a full-back called Lárus Sigurðsson with whom he later played briefly at WBA) I’ve not seen clips of the game but I was just so proud at the time, I was 20-years-old to get my international debut in a massive qualifier like that, I can look back with a little bit of pride on it really.”
In an era when, as he says himself, some players “retire from international football at 21 or 22” he is the antithesis of the pampered egotists who get too big for where they came from. Reared in Preston by a dad, Farrell, from Achill Island, and a mother, Theresa, from Longford via Liverpool, he had more of a sense of his origins than many players born and reared on this island. His Dad worked on the roads. His Mam was a dinner lady. Their house was haunted by the ghosts of Kevin Barry and Dev and JFK and dreams were green and a meal wasn’t a meal unless it had potatoes on the plate.
“There’s no point in me saying I always dreamed of winning 100 caps for Ireland because winning one cap was beyond what I dreamed about. It would mean a lot. You get into the 90s and it does get spoken about. I’ve tried to brush it off. You have big games and you try to focus but when you are a kid growing up you never dream of even playing once. I can’t say it was a dream to play a 100 times because I never thought I would get anything like that. When I was a kid no Irish payer had ever played 100 times. To get there and be so close I can only say that I am really, really proud. Even when I won that first cap I was just thinking this is brilliant. If I never won another cap I would have been happy.”
He was a fresh-faced kid at Preston, his local club, making modest waves as a shoulders hunched, down the tramlines winger when Sam Allardyce came to him with good news. Kevin Kilbane had been picked to play for the England youths. No other thought crossed Kilbane’s mind that day but how do I explain this to the boss. “But I’m Irish,” he said and that was it. He was on the way to fulfilling a dream that he’d had since childhood, something that he nurtured through watching Ireland beat England in Stuttgart in 1988 and beating Italy in New Jersey six years later. That was what he wanted to be part of.
Lately life has speeded up at club level. After a gentle start in the backwaters with Preston and then West Bromwich there were some unhappy times at Sunderland before he moved to Everton and onto Wigan and then Hull where he has even ended up playing centre back without calling his agent and demanding a move. With the business of changing job so regularly surely he has thought about the well-used old bolthole: concentrating on his club career.
“Definitely not. I love coming in. Now, even more so when you can reflect on it all. I look back on it all with a smile on my face. There have been times when probably I haven’t performed or I have underachieved a little bit but worse things can happen and do happen. I love it. I enjoy training. To play at this stage, it has been very, very fulfilling. I have been asked why so many times? The media have asking me since I was about 27 when am I going to retire! Trying to tell me something! I think in general now the normal thing to do is retire very, very early.
“Lads who retire early don’t want to play. They have Champions League or massive games at club level, for me this is my Champions League. You have a family and are away for a couple of weeks at a time and it’s not easy on them but my wife knows what it means to me to play for Ireland. As long as she is supporting me I will play.”
And oddly for a player who is so cheerfully self-deprecating, one suspects that for another while, as Eddie Nolan works his apprenticeship, there will be some place for him as long as he wants it. Kilbane may never have had the magic feet of a Duff or a McGeady but he had devoted himself to his game with the heart of a kid who would play football from dawn to dusk and then come in and dream about playing football. He works harder than just about every player he plays with because he doesn’t think of what he does as hard work.
Tonight is an evening in the office which fits into that category. Fun. He loves the days when the green shirts are pitted against more vaunted opposition, the days when passion and pride can make a difference. When he talks about Italy and other big nights he subconsciously explains how he fits in to Irish teams, how as a winger he never left an Irish full-back exposed, and as a full-back he has no quit in him.
“Going into the Dutch game in 2001 we were going into the unknown. We knew if we beat Holland we would put them out of it. It was such a massive game. There is that bit of a vibe or similar sort of feel this week. If the worst comes to the worst our rule is don’t concede. Try to stay in the game as long as possible. That’s always been the way with Irish sides. If the worst comes to the worst don’t give goals away cheaply. Every game we have played in we have been confident we will score a goal. We just try to make sure they don’t score a goal.”
He puts up his hand to the mistake in Bulgaria which cost points and doesn’t view that night in Bari as quite the triumph the rest of us did, given that the Italians were reduced to 10 men so early on but whatever has happened in the past is over and done with. He wants one more shot. A big night like tonight and maybe, though he would never admit to even daydreaming about it, another World Cup. His farewell note to Japan and South Korea after all was an unhappy one. That wide from two yards after Iker Casillas had saved Ian Harte’s penalty. At the end of extra-time though it was Kevin Kilbane who put his hand up to take one of the penalties. He missed but others hid from the responsibility.
There’ll be other better players hiding from the responsibility tonight too. Kevin Kilbane, unfashionable to the point of quaintness will be running his heart out though acting like the sort of footballer we all dreamed of becoming, the sort who never loses touch with the romance of the game. And he’ll have better stories to tell his kids and grandkids. Grand tales that don’t involve sulks, self-pity or superman jocks.
