Elegy for Sparky on his 32nd birthday

LOCKER ROOM:The waning of a football season and the waning of a football talent prompt ruination on the steady drizzle of anti-climax entailed by professional sport, writes Tom Humphries

SEASONS FADE. Crystal Palace secured a shot at the play-offs yesterday. The Prem beckons! A stonking great 5-0 win over Burnley with Victor Moses and Sean Scannell, two prodigious 17-year-olds on the pitch at the end. Palace are one of those clubs. Everyone likes Palace. Having exciting kids lining out in their all-too-cool strip is part of the package.

Once, a few years ago, I accepted a modest but welcome sum of money in exchange for a promise to write what, even I accepted, would be a modest but welcome novel.

This was a mistake. I found it considerably easier to spend the money than to write the novel. I wasn't at all deterred by the starkly defined limits of my writing style or my wantonly sluttish embrace of just about every cliche of word and form I could find; what I found most frustrating was that every idea I hatched had already been adequately dealt with by people who didn't suffer from these handicaps.

BS Johnson worked as a match reporter for the Observer to supplement the meagre income the seven novels he wrote in his lifetime generated. Back in 1973, at the age of 40, he took his own life, and the recognition he was due for the inventive way he played with form and chronology and the declarative sharpness of his writing was further postponed until a few years ago when a reprinting of The Unfortunates and a biography shed some light on a career that was an almost forgotten curiosity.

Personally I had plodded along like a corpulent hamster on a little-used wheel assuming that just as sports reporting had sprung me from a life of long-term unemployment the even more sedentary business of novel writing would spring me from a life of long-term sports reporting.

As I often tell people keen to pursue the, ahem, "vocation" of sports hackery, our profession is really just a form of assisted living for those unequipped to make a more useful contribution to society.

So, after a period where my most fulfilling act of literary creativity was the careful screening of all calls lest they be from the publisher who had proffered the cash, I accepted the grim truth of the situation, sold one of the children into the white slave trade and returned the money to the publisher. I accepted I didn't have either the talent or the discipline to write a novel.

Early on in my career as a sports hack, Mark Kennedy was the boy wonder of all boy wonders. I've been fascinated by him ever since. He scored 49 goals in a season for the Millwall youth side and when he broke through to the first team at the age of 16 he scored eight goals in 12 league games and pretty much every one was a contender for goal of the season.

When he scored an absolute screamer against Arsenal in the cup the big clubs could no longer contain themselves. Liverpool, his boyhood idols, made him the "most expensive teenager ever" and paid him, we were told, the colossal amount of £3,000 a week.

A friend and colleague of mine on the sports-hackery freelance circuit had been to London to share a burger and some wisdom with Kennedy while he was still at Millwall and for a while it seemed as if this modest investment in making a journalistic connection would ensure my friend's career was as meteoric and lucrative as Kennedy's. He was The Man Who Knew Mark Kennedy.

I recall the minor disappointment of being a gloriously failed novelist, that of being the one man on the planet who doesn't actually have one good novel in man, only because I have been reading BS Johnson's The Unfortunates and happened upon the startling fact Mark Kennedy will be 32 years old this month.

These three things, each randomly suggestive of each other in my slowly turning brain, speak of the corrosive disappointment of middle age. BS Johnson once famously rang the Observer sports desk on a Saturday afternoon and said to a startled sub-editor, "I've just thought of an idea for a novel. Can you take the report from agency?"

The Unfortunates is rather like the backdoor system to the All-Ireland series: offputting in form but really quite enjoyable in content. The book comes in a box. The first and final chapters are fixed points. The other 25 are loose pamphlets to be read randomly.

The subject matter is a day spent reporting on a match in Nottingham. The narrator, Johnson's own voice, gets off the train in Nottingham, and various familiar points bring back to him memories of his old friend Tony Tillingham, who died of cancer.

The device of delivering the chapters randomly suggests the randomness of the disease itself but also reflects in a more trivial way the nature of a game of football itself. Two fixed points: the beginning and the end. Everything in between unfolds randomly.

In the 1994/1995 season Kennedy scored 10 goals in 30 league appearances for Millwall. The next year he made his international debut for Ireland in Vienna and was brilliant.

His first act after coming on as a sub for Liverpool on his debut in a game against Leeds was to whack a 30-yard shot against the underside of the Leeds crossbar. The ball bounced down onto the line but stayed out.

After that it was all downhill for Mark Kennedy.

Nobody has written more beautifully or perceptively than Brian Stanley Johnson does in The Unfortunates about the steady rain of disappointments an involvement with professional sports brings.

There are some people in the press box and down on the field who maintain as though in aspic a boyish enthusiasm for everything they do. For players it is the turning out week after week trying to kickstart some of that romantic innocence that stirred their play back when they were prodigies. For hacks it is trying to simulate some sort of emotional response when the afternoon's viewing has been nothing but work.

Johnson wrote about the carrot that keeps every one of us donkeys walking: "Always at the start of each match, the excitement, often the only moment of excitement, that this might be the one match . . . the one moment, the one match. A new beginning is it? But already I suspect the worst . . . have to be prepared, as always, in everything, to settle for less."

Those of us who jockey pencils around the pages of notebooks for a living are all too familiar with that sentiment, but thinking of Mark Kennedy putting down his 32nd birthday in a few days' time as a player who has made eight appearances for Crystal Palace this season you realise there must have been so many days since he hit that crossbar when he wondered if this would be the day when he went on fire again.

They used to call him Sparky. It's not a name befitting a veteran player and it is hard to imagine that for prodigies at Palace like young Sean Scannell the legend of Mark Kennedy is anything more than a remote myth. Sparky scored eight goals in a season for Manchester City, and apart from that cluster of scores when he was a kid that was his greatest season.

The Unfortunates, a brilliantly inventive novel, was panned by the critics who distrusted things like brilliant invention. Johnson felt broken down every Sunday morning by what sub-editors on the Observer did to his reports. The disappointment gathered like a parliament of crows on the wires above his head.

Mark Kennedy had his £3,000 a week and mornings no doubt when he woke up and felt like a master of the universe. Thirty-two now and forgotten but not gone, he knows that even if some Saturday afternoon match returns him to his teenage self, all flashing heels and trickery, it won't change the depressing trajectory of his career. Too late.

Kennedy's birthday comes at the end of an English season, giving him twice the reason for an annual stock-take. He must look at the prodigies and smile to himself.

Random chapters, never knowing whether you are closer to failure than to success. Now that he has time, Sparky could find a lot to enjoy in Johnson's book in a box.